Chasm
by Rhino7
Summary: Leon takes a squad of soldiers aboard a derelict spacecraft that has settled into orbit around TWTNW. It appears abandoned, but they quickly discover that there is more to this ship than meets the eye. They are not alone on board, and time is not on their side. Alliance-verse. Rated for language.
1. Part One

**Chasm**

**By Rhino7**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This story is mine, as are McCallister, Banks, and Lolly. Language warning: Banks is one of Cid's interns and as such has a bit of a mouth. I'm trying to claw my way out of the fluff vortex that I've been trapped in lately, and this is a story idea that I've had for a while now. This story will consist of three parts. Sorry if I'm a little rusty. It's been a while since I've written proper action suspense. Enjoy!**

**..:-X-:..**

**Part One**

Oblivion was slow to release its hold on Leon, but when it did, it did so violently.

"Wake up!" A woman was screaming.

The ground underneath him was trembling, and jagged edges of the floor were pushing up at his back at awkward angles. Every inch of his body hurt, but his senses were just foggy and disjointed enough not to fully register pain. He was trapped in that strange mental purgatory between unaware and aware.

"Come on. Wake up." The woman's voice pushed through the fog, along with a pair of hands on his shoulders, jostling him slightly.

The pain overpowered the fog then, and it felt like fire had erupted under his ribcage on his left side. He hissed and forced his eyes open. The world was a swirl of dark colors overhead, and just at the edge of his vision, the blurry figure of a woman was leaning over him. He could only make out the green of her shirt and brown hair tumbling over her shoulders. He felt one of her hands prod at what was probably a very significant wound under his ribs.

"Cura." She muttered.

Warmth spread from the hand and blossomed over his torso, closing the wound and mending the skin and whatever else he had torn up in the fall. Because he had fallen, hadn't he? That sounded right. Why was he so disoriented?

"We have to go." A man's voice cut in at his periphery. "NOW."

"We can't just leave him here like this—" She was arguing.

The after-effect of the healing spell left Leon feeling hazy, and he started to slip back under the blanket of oblivion.

"I'll—" The man started. "…He'll be fine. Trust me."

Questions rained down on Leon, and he stopped himself from passing out again. Who were these people? Where was he? Where was the rest of his…squad? Yes, because he had been running a mission with a squad…So how did…When did…

The broken floor under his body jerked abruptly, and he gasped involuntarily. He opened his eyes and willed his vision to focus. The woman at his side was tugging something out of her belt. Withdrawing the object, she pushed it into one of his limp hands and then she was standing and backing away quickly.

"It's falling apart." The man was saying. "Give them the go-ahead."

Leon felt the floor jerk violently a second time, and he used the momentum of the movement overcome his inertia, rolling onto his side. Adrenaline was pumping into his limbs at that point, so he was able to push past the fog and the dull aches in his joints to push himself up to his knees. He just caught a glimpse of two receding backs as the two mystery strangers sprinted across the cracking concrete floor of the massive room. They darted through a door and disappeared.

He tried to get his bearings, but the floor and the walls around him were shaking and jarring, threatening to send him back to his face. Beams were falling from the ceiling. The floor was buckling and breaking apart. Naked wires had broken loose and were spraying sparks into the musty air. The only lights in the room were dull and flickering, revealing him to be in a cavernous chamber, surrounded by what looked like the hulking masses of Gummi Ships: a hangar.

Then, just as abruptly as the shaking started, everything stopped, and he ended up on all fours to try and maintain his balance. He failed.

_Earlier…_

_Leon had never liked space missions. There was something disquieting about the utter stillness and silence. He was rarely one to complain about being alone, but there was a distinct difference between being alone and being isolated. It was where he and Cid primarily differed in their opinion of space travel. To Leon, it was a void, an empty, barren nothingness that took and took and scarcely gave anything back. To Cid, it was an endless expanse of unchartered territory, just teeming with adventure and demanding to be explored._

_Yet, here Leon was, instead of Cid, inside the Gummi Ship with three other soldiers as they flew toward their target. Cid's most notorious recruit, Major Valerie Banks, was piloting the ship. Leon had run an extended mission with the woman before, so he was accustomed to her caustic manner and foul mouth, but it was entertaining to watch the other two soldiers react to her language and acidic tone: she was one of Cid's, wasn't that to be expected? Her dark hair was tied up in a sloppy knot at the back of her head, the rest of her slim build hidden under the bulky space suit._

"_This is Major Valerie Banks," She was speaking into the transmitter. "of the Allied Republic of Kingdom Hearts. You have not been authorized to orbit this planet. Identify yourselves or we will be forced to take action."_

_Standing in the doorway to the cockpit, Leon looked past her, through the windshield of the ship. The unidentified spacecraft loomed ominously ahead of them, getting larger as they drew closer. The vessel was a sight to behold: easily twice the length and capacity of any transport carrier that the Alliance used. It bore no insignia, Allied or otherwise, and there were signs of battle damage on its starboard side. Preliminary scans had revealed literal tons of weapons, missiles, bombs, and artillery on board the ship, but the hull was too dense to scan for signs of life. All attempts to establish communication had failed. The mysterious vessel's crew was either gone or ignoring them. He figured it was the former, considering that, since the fall of Organization XIII, the inhabitants of The World That Never Was had become, for lack of a better word, xenophobic. There had been incidences recently of the Allied base on the world shooting down any unidentified ships that entered the planet's atmosphere without clearance._

_Banks clicked off the transmitted. "Little shits won't answer." She cast a look through the windshield. "Look at the size of this fucker." She murmured._

_He just grunted and heard some scuffling in the hold of the ship behind him. He left Banks to let her align their Gummi with the undamaged port side in order to dock, and he stepped back into the hold. His right hand soldier, Private Tabaeus McCallister, was already in her space suit, sans the helmet, arms folded and lips pursed to a thin line as she stared through the port hole to the nameless, derelict ship. The scuffling noises had been coming from Leon's newest recruit, an uppity young man named Chris Lolly, who was acting like he'd never seen a zipper before as he tried to wrangle into the suit._

"_Are you having issues, private?" Leon addressed the fumbling man._

_Lolly straightened abruptly, wide eyed and looking excitable. "Just nerves, sir." He said, smiling anxiously before immediately forcing his lips flat like McCallister's. "Sorry, sir."_

_Leon caught McCallister looking at Lolly with a deadpan expression. She had made her opinion of the enthusiastic young man clear to Leon, but she hadn't spoken a word of it since he had decided to accept Lolly into the program. To her, Leon's acceptance was the final word; she wouldn't contest with him verbally after that. Though that didn't stop her from looking peeved that Lolly had managed to grab a slot on this mission._

"_Six hours." Leon said, getting their attention. "The base on The World That Never Was has given us six hours to board this ship and figure out what the situation is before they take action. It's likely that it's been abandoned, but we're taking precautions regardless."_

"_Me and Major Banks are to find the Flight Deck." Lolly rambled, trying to prove that he knew what he was doing after the zipper fiasco. "Assess the flight capability of the ship and access the historical logs to find out all we can about the ship's origins, while you and Private McCallister investigate the other levels."_

_Across the hold, McCallister took up her M15 assault rifle and checked her twin side holsters, where she had sheathed two handguns. She looked pointedly unimpressed with Lolly's kiss-assing. Leon stifled an amused snort._

"_Moving into position." Banks called. "Preparing to dock. Get your shit together."_

_Leon took up his Gunblade and reluctantly climbed into his own space suit. The three of them finished securing their gear and making sure the suits were functional as Banks docked their Gummi with the carrier vessel. There was no telling in what state the life support systems on board would be; they would carry six hours' worth of oxygen with them just in case. McCallister eventually gave an indignant huff and helped Lolly secure his suit._

_There was some slight jostling as the stabilizing brackets extended from the body of the Gummi, latching onto the exterior of the mysterious ship and accessing the exterior door to the carrier. With a hiss and a pop, the Gummi stilled, safely attached to the carrier._

_Banks stepped out of the cockpit, latching her helmet onto the neck of her suit. "All yours, Commander."_

_Leon exchanged a look with McCallister, who stepped away from the fidgeting Lolly and lifted her rifle with a terse nod._

As the ground stopped quaking under him, Leon lifted his face again, taking in a sharp breath. The air smelled like metal and rot. He coughed and got his arms under him, lifting his upper half off the floor. The disorientation passed more quickly this time and he sat up, casting his eyes around.

Wait.

The cavernous hangar still surrounded him. The old, rusted Gummi Ships were still moored to the floor. But the floor…was solid, unbroken. There were no flying wires and sparks. There were no cracks in the concrete. No sounds of destruction, like the entire place was tearing itself apart. The two strangers were gone. Instead, the hangar yawned unnervingly around him.

Leon got up on his knees and felt something in his hand. He looked down and recognized the black steel of a standard issue Glock pistol in his fingers. It was loaded and only had a small scratch at the base of the magazine. He coughed again at the horrid smell. The visor of his helmet was broken, but luckily none of the glass had fallen in on him. The life support system was intact then, apparently. Swallowing hard, Leon undid the latches at the base of the helmet and removed it before wriggling out of the rest of the suit.

There was a splotch of blood across the stomach of the suit where he'd—Leon blinked at the material—been impaled. The blood soaked through the front and the back of the suit, and also through the white of his shirt on both sides. How had he survived that? The strange woman's healing spell had worked, however, as only the fading scar of newly mended skin remained. He glanced back at the floor where he'd awakened. There was a small pile of debris…busted wood and some piping, but nothing strong enough to push through a human torso.

It was a pile of junk in an otherwise pristine-but-dusty chamber. With a frown, Leon lifted his eyes from the debris and looked toward the ceiling. Sure enough, a jagged hole hung gaping in the concrete overhead. He must have fallen through the ceiling. But how? Why? Had there been an attack? Lowering his gaze to the debris again, he knelt down, rummaging through the ruined suit. His Gunblade was missing. He found the radio, but it was busted and useless. He grunted in exasperation and tossed it back into the pile.

The rancid odor in the hangar was getting harder to ignore, and Leon turned to face the larger side of the chamber. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he became aware that, while the concrete floor was unbroken, it was not clear as he had originally thought. There were lumps scattered on the concrete surface, indistinct from the debris except that the lumps weren't made of broken wood and piping.

They were bodies.

Leon recoiled and lifted an arm to cover the lower half of his face. There had to be at least a dozen bodies strewn across the hangar floor, all in varying states of decay. Some looked like they had been here for years, untouched. Some were nearly skeletons in torn clothes. Some in crew uniforms, some in civilian clothes. Others were still…fresh. Bile rose in the back of his throat, and Leon turned away from the sight.

The door leading out of the hangar was open.

Leon coughed a final time and made his way toward the open door. That had to have been where those two people had fled. None of this was making any sense. This ship had been completely abandoned: he distinctly remembered his squad confirming THAT much. The air was chilled around him, and his breath was visible as he exhaled. He needed information. He needed answers. He needed to find his squad and his Gunblade.

He reached the doorway and pulled himself through into a dimly lit hallway. A gag reflex made his shoulders buckle once, but nothing came up. Regaining himself, he straightened and looked each way down the corridor. Emergency lights were flickering along the middle of the ceiling. Blood was stained on the yellowing white walls and the uncovered piping near the ceiling. No more bodies, but the blood was dark and dry. It had been there a long time. There had been no blood or bodies when he and his squad had first boarded this ship. What was happening here?

Both directions of the corridor looked equally bleak, and there were no signs of the two strangers who had healed him. He stepped forward, keeping the Glock held low with both hands, squinting into the semi-darkness. If McCallister, Banks, and Lolly were still alive in this place, he had to find them.

The splattering of blood on the hallway walls suddenly converged as he stepped toward the opposite wall from the hangar door. It wasn't…splattered or randomly flung there. It looked…purposefully smeared onto the dusty wall. Leon grimaced and stepped closer, deciphering the smudges as words. Words written in blood on the wall of an abandoned space transport.

"Engine Room," it read, with a blackened bloody arrow pointing to his left.

Leon stared at it for a moment, a pit of dread growing in his chest.

"What…" His whispered.

The floor under his feet jerked suddenly, and he staggered, keeping his balance. The walls shuddered, and Leon felt a tingle ascend his spine. A strange, unpleasant energy permeated the air around him, ballooning through the hallway and moving past him. It felt like the entire ship groaned, with the echo of it originating down the hall on his left, from the "Engine Room." There was a reverberating sound like ripping paper, and a wave of dizziness swept over him. He grabbed onto a solid pipe hanging from the wall and closed his eyes, waiting for it to pass.

_Leon took point, leading the other three off their small Gummi and into the exterior port of the unknown ship. The initial room that they entered was vacant. It was black as pitch and all four of them activated the night vision on their helmets, enabling them to see. Green light flooded Leon's vision through his space visor, giving an eerie glow to the state of disheveled emptiness in the room. McCallister stayed right at Leon's left elbow, her rifle aloft and alert. Major Banks followed behind, and Private Lolly brought up the rear…bumping into every piece of furniture and stepping on every creaky part of the floor as he went._

_The four of them fanned out soundlessly, finding the room entirely abandoned: dusty and harboring no sign of people, fight, or evacuation. McCallister moved into the hallway first, covering the back side of the squad as Leon swept down the opposite end of the corridor, followed by Banks and Lolly. The hallway was like the first room: dusty and empty. This pattern was repeated in all the subsequent rooms that they broke into. _

_Once it was established that the ship had been abandoned, the squad split. Banks maneuvered past Leon, gun in hand, and nodded for Lolly to follow her. The two soldiers navigated down the hallway, turning a corner and disappearing. Their footsteps faded as they headed deeper into the ship, seeking the Flight Deck. Leon and McCallister backtracked to the original room where they'd boarded, taking the opposite direction until they found a set of stairs._

_Descending to the lower levels of the ship, what they found was consistent with the upper decks: nothing, no crew, no bodies, no signs of struggle, no evidence of…anything. Just dust and a few displaced papers. There were small cabin rooms with residential furniture and simple bedding. There were supply closets and electrical rooms, none of which were online._

_Leon and McCallister were both quiet as they walked shoulder to shoulder, picking their way through the hollow ship. Their foot falls were light, leaving prints in the dust, but echoing off steel walls. Leon became aware of the crushing silence in the ship. It carried with it that familiar sense of isolation that all space missions carried for him, despite the living and breathing soldier at his side. There was also a bone deep chill that penetrated the thickness of the space suit, pushing at his skin and pawing at him. He could feel perspiration beading on his forehead and he tried to swallow the anxiety._

_He shifted his grip on the Gunblade, glancing sideways and meeting McCallister's eyes through the glass of her helmet. Her face was stony and she stared back at him. She could sense it too. Something was wrong with this ship. It wasn't that it was abandoned: phantom ships were rare in this part of the galaxy, but they did happen sometimes. It wasn't the silence or the stillness: that was just the nature of space. It was the very existence of this ship. His instincts were sending prickly signals under his skin, demanding that he get his squad off this vessel and damn the mission._

_Something caught his attention at the edge of his vision. Wordlessly, Leon found himself and McCallister both snapping to face forward again, his Gunblade raised and her M15 aimed into the darkness. They had stopped walking and shifted their footing. There was an unshakeable dread settling in Leon's gut, but he couldn't place it._

_The shadows at the end of the hall shifted._

The dizziness soon passed, and Leon straightened, lifting his head…only for a wave to crash over him again as he realized that the hallway had changed. The wall in front of him was blank, clear of the blood splatters and the bloody "Engine Room" writing and arrow. Leon stood and forced himself to breathe, crossing over to the wall abruptly and lifting his hand to it. There was no sign that the bloody marks had ever been there.

His brain scrambled for an explanation. This wasn't possible. Everything had been covered in blood. He had seen it with his own two eyes. He had hardly closed his eyes against the dizziness for a moment or two, not nearly enough time for that much blood to be cleared away…and for what purpose?

He looked to his left, down the corridor where the now-nonexistent sign had been pointing. With a swallow, he started walking in that direction. If he could find the stairs to head back up to the main level, where he had presumably fallen through the floor, he might be able to pick up on the trail and find McCallister or the other two. This ship wasn't stable, and something inexplicable was happening here. His squad wasn't equipped to handle this. Hell, he didn't even know what THIS was.

He passed through a set of pried-open security doors and found himself in a wider hallway with elevators on either side of him. Still no blood or bodies to see. No dust either. He found the doors to the stairwell and slipped past them, finding the metal stairs winding up and down in a tight column. He started to go up, cringing at how much noise the old stairs were making as he ascended.

A low, shuddering groan suddenly reverberated up the spine of the stairwell and Leon stilled, breathing slowly and straining his ears for the sound. The noise had no point of origin that he could pick up on; it seemed to be emanating from the walls of the ship itself. Like the ship was yawning or moaning in distress. Just as abruptly as it began, the groan stopped, leaving Leon in isolated stillness. He exhaled evenly and clenched his jaw, resuming his climb up the stairs.

He stepped off the next floor that the stairwell opened onto and found another room of elevators and emptiness. He started down the hallway and tried to re-orient himself. He would need to angle to his right to find the hole that he'd fallen through. He didn't recall investigating this part of the ship with McCallister, but every hallway looked the same anyway.

Leon had barely turned the first corner when a scream exploded through the hallway. A high-pitched, deafening shriek clawed across the steel walls, and the suddenness nearly sent Leon out of his skin. Instead, he lifted the Glock and swept around the corner, trying to locate the source of the screaming. It didn't sound human or even like an animal. It was just…noise.

But it was noise in a place that reeked of isolation and silence, so he had to find what was causing it. He picked up his pace to a cautious jog, sending his eyes around the corridors as he turned this way, then that way, and ran down the hallway before taking another turn. Eventually, he came around a final corner just as the screaming faded away, leaving his ears ringing and his pulse throbbing at the back of his skull.

The shadows at the end of the hall shuddered.

Leon blinked and lifted the gun. Had he just seen…Not again.

"McCallister." He called out.

His voice echoed through the hallway.

"Banks. Lolly." He yelled, creeping forward. "Can any of you hear me?"

The shadows at the edge of his vision shifted again, and he glared at them. He was exhausted and probably still concussed from his fall earlier. Now his imagination was running wild and that was never a good—

In a surreal sloughing movement, the shadow crawled over the pipes, dragging itself along the floor. Leon didn't move, keeping his gun trained on the shadow as it skirted around his boots before it bolted toward the end of the hall.

That was not his imagination.

Leon gave chase after it but only made it a few steps.

As if sensing that it was being followed, the shadow roared and rushed toward him, filling the entire hallway. The air temperature of the hallway seemed to drop and every molecule in the space felt suddenly electrified, making the hair on Leon's neck stand up. The disembodied shadow launched toward him like a subway in a very compact tunnel, and Leon lifted the gun, firing twice into the mass. The darkness might have been smoke for all the good the bullets did. As the shadow continued to barrel toward him, roaring like a freight train, Leon reacted on instinct.

He threw himself into the frame of the closest doorway, using his shoulder as a battering ram and gaining access to the room beyond. There was a rush of dizziness, and the floor and walls jerked and jostled around him as he did so. It was the same sensation that he had felt before, when everything inexplicably changed in the hallway.

Not again…

_As Leon and McCallister stood, aiming their weapons at the shifting shadows, Private Lolly's voice came over the radio in their helmets. "We've reached the Flight Deck, sir. Banks thinks that she can re-open the circuits for the emergency backup system from here."_

"_Then do it." Leon hissed. "We're not alone down here."_

"_What? Huh? What do you mean not alone?" Lolly sounded trepid. "We did a scan for signs of life and came up with bupkiss."_

_Banks's voice interrupted him. "Gimme a fuckin' second. This tech is like nothing I've ever seen…"_

_The shadow at the end of the hallway shifted again, and Leon's grip tightened on the Gunblade._

"_What's the status of the life support system?" He demanded._

"_Fully operational." Private Lolly reported. "We've got our helmets off and everything up here, sir. You're all clear."_

"_Looks like the ship's flight capabilities are fully intact." Banks rattled off. "I'm activating the emergency backup light system now."_

_Leon and McCallister kept their eyes forward, but fluidly lifted one hand to de-activate their night vision just as the emergency lights overhead kicked on. Light flooded the hallway, cutting into the darkness at the end of the corridor. In that split second, the shadows disappeared, banished by the sudden light._

"_What did you mean, not alone?" Lolly asked again. "Did you find any survivors?"_

"_It's gone." Leon replied flatly, stepping forward and squinting. "Whatever it was, it wasn't a survivor. You said you scanned for life forms?"_

"_Yes, sir." Lolly rambled, "But we got nada. Banks is hacking into the logs now to try and find blueprints or notes by the captain."_

_McCallister moved past Leon, casting her eyes around the hallway and investigating a few of the closed doors. She ducked out of the rooms almost as quickly as she entered them, until she reached one near the end of the hallway. Leon followed her in when she didn't emerge, and the flickering lights of the backup system illuminated the armory._

_Lolly was still talking, and Leon hissed, "Shut up, private."_

_Though the shelves and cabinets had been specifically designed to hold mounted weapons and artillery, the armory room was completely empty. Not a single magazine or weapon had been left behind. The dusty floor was disturbed and scuffed, recently touched, but the only item in the room that got any attention was a blood stained cloth that had been left on the floor._

_McCallister squatted and picked up the cloth, turned it over a few times, and then tossed it back to the floor. Leon kept his Gunblade in his hands, stepping around the chamber and assessing that it was devoid of both weapons and people before making his way back to the soldier._

"_Leonha—" Banks sudden cut over the radio._

"_Banks?" Leon straightened._

"_Holy ball sack!" Banks screamed. "Leonhart?!"_

_Static blasted over the radio, and both Leon and McCallister grimaced._

"_Banks? Major Banks!" Leon barked into the radio. "Lolly! Respond, dammit."_

_The floor under their feet shuddered, and the empty shelves rattled around them with the movement. The static on the radio fell to silence, and neither Banks nor Lolly responded._

_Leon swore and stepped back out into the hallway. The lights stayed on, and the quaking of the floor soon ceased._

"_Banks. Lolly. What the Hell just happened?" He ordered into the radio._

_Silence was his only reply._

As soon as the jostling stopped, Leon registered the quiet and looked around. He had sought shelter in an empty storage room. There were a few cardboard boxes and a set of folding chairs scattered about, nothing more. Forcing his breathing to calm, Leon waited until all noise and shifting in the hallway at his back had stopped, and then he turned and slowly pushed the door open again.

The hallway that greeted him was covered in filth, dust, and blood. The first thing that his eyes registered was a bloody arrow painted on the wall, aiming to his left. For a moment, Leon merely stared at the sign. It was back. How was that possible? The walls had been clean. First there had been blood and bodies, then all of it had disappeared with that shuddering energy surge that passed through the ship. Now, after another surge of…whatever that shaking had been…the mess was back.

What the actual Hell!?

Adrenaline-fueled sweat was pooling around his neck in earnest now, and he hated the utter confusion and lack of logic that was swimming over him. Before, the first arrow had been accompanied by the bloody writing of "Engine Room." This arrow had the same kind of hasty smear to it. It screamed suspicion at him, and the blackened state of the blood made his skin crawl, but he had no other leads.

Gritting his teeth, Leon turned left and inched his way down the hallway. More blood and grime followed, along with bits of trash and rusty material. It felt like hours had passed since he had regained consciousness in the hangar and like an otherworldly length of time had passed since they had embarked on this ship.

Was he hallucinating? If so, which was the illusion: the clean, empty hallway or the blood spattered one? If he and McCallister had been attacked, where was she? If the attack had been poisonous and he was delirious, where was she? Where was the rest of his squad? Everything seemed to be slurring together in his mind, and it was becoming more difficult to sort out the chronological order of events that had led to this moment.

Engine Room.

He read the words before he comprehended them.

Leon stood before a set of double doors, the title slate above the doors reading "Engine Room." The doors were closed, and a thick set of chain links were bolted through the handles, barring entrance. They were rusted and rigid though, untouched for years, probably decades. He grasped the chains with one hand, jingling them slightly. The rust slid against itself and some of it peeled away, drifting down to the floor. The integrity of the chain was weak, but it was still too strong to break by hand.

Why the engine room? Why had someone left arrows directing him this way? Why had he followed them? The curiosity clawed at him, and he felt a sudden need to erect some kind of purpose to this. He needed to get some grasp of what was going on and why this was happening. He stood against one of the doors, holding the Glock's barrel against the chain, away from his body. He pulled the trigger, and the gun report echoed up and down the hallway.

The noise would either alert his squad to his location, or it would alert that…shadow or whatever thing he had seen earlier. Either way, he was going to have to make this fast. The chain shattered at the impact point, and Leon tugged the chain through the handles, freeing the door.

He kicked open one of the doors. When no attacks were flung through, he slipped inside and faced the engine room. The chamber was smaller than the hangar, but it was still much larger than he had anticipated. The ceiling was low, but the length and width of the room seemed to stretch across entire soccer fields. Keeping the Glock aimed at the floor, he snuck forward, scanning his surroundings.

The walls were almost entirely comprised of computer monitors, buttons, levers, and control panels. A few of them were lit and appeared to be online. Data streamed in rapidly paced matrices down a select few number of monitors. Piles of stuff were lumped further into the room, near where a steel set of bars blocked one from going farther. The piles looked like bags, like gear and supplies. Whatever lay beyond the steel bars was lying lower than the rest of the room, as he couldn't see the floor. Light was emanating up from it. Keeping his senses on alert, he crept forward, nearing the bars.

The massive room appeared to be empty and quiet, aside from the hum of the lights and the control panel…along with an eerie, underlying hiss that was coming from behind the set of bars. He had almost reached the bars when movement jarred out of the silence behind him.

Leon started to turn, but something hard and blunt slammed across his shoulders, sending him face-first into the set of bars. There was a grunt behind him, and Leon vaguely glanced down, seeing a deep crevasse of blue light, bubbling up from what looked like ten vertical stories of a hollowed out column. The energy source that was powering the ship.

Why did it look like a…

Then the rest of his mind caught up, and he shoved backward, throwing off his attacker. He spun and leveled the handgun, firing in the direction of the body. The person had dropped, however, and swung one leg out, taking his knees out from under him. Leon hit the floor but rolled hard, taking his momentum and coming back up in a squat.

His attacker had a sword, long and with a broad width to it. The handle was crooked slightly and in the dim lighting of the room—not to mention the after-flash affect that the light of the energy source had on his eyes—it was difficult to recognize his attacker immediately. But he did recognize his Gunblade in the attacker's hands.

They stalemated like that: he with the Glock aimed at the attacker, and the attacker holding the Gunblade expertly in his direction.

Then his eyes adjusted. He knew that combat stance anywhere.

"McCallister?" He kept the handgun level, but skewed it slightly so that it wasn't aiming directly at his soldier's head.

Private McCallister didn't move, still holding the Gunblade aloft with both hands, her feet set. She too had discarded her space suit, leaving her only in her sleeveless green shirt and fatigue pants. Her clothes were burned and torn in a few places. Her normally tight ponytail had been jostled loose, sending frazzled flyaway hair down over her face. She was covered in dirt and blood, and there was sweat running in literal streams down her body.

"McCallister, it's me." Leon didn't like the wild, cold look in her eyes, even as she was staring directly at him. "Stand down, soldier. What happened here?" He took a step forward.

She took a menacing step toward him, Gunblade raised firmly in her hands, looking fully ready and able to drop him where he stood.

"Don't you fucking move." She hissed.

**..:-X-:..**

**A/N:** Constructive feedback is always welcome and appreciated!


	2. Part Two

**Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This story is mine, as are McCallister, Banks, and Lolly. This took a lot longer to write than I thought, but I recently got my muse kicked into overdrive, so that's that.**

**Shout out to HeartofFyrwinde for helping me sort out the seemingly neverending hiccups of this story and for pushing me to keep working on it. You're da bomb, dude, thanks.**

**..:-X-:..**

**Part Two**

For a trepid moment, Leon stared. Private McCallister stood square against him ten feet away, aiming his own Gunblade at him, emotionless in her expression.

"Drop the gun." She demanded.

The ship's walls on either side of them shuddered.

Leon slowly lifted his hands, "Get a hold of yourself, soldier. It's me."

One of her hands slid fluidly from the handle of the Gunblade and wrapped around the trigger mechanism at the base. "Drop the gun." She repeated.

Leon eyed her. She looked haggard and exhausted; there was no telling what she had encountered since they'd been separated. The light from the energy core behind them cast an unstable light across her, showing off a thin line of raised skin, running laterally from shoulder to shoulder across her collar bones: a healed scar that he had never seen before.

He slowly reached his free hand to the hand holding the Glock handgun. He removed the magazine deliberately in front of her and set them both on the floor before straightening.

"You want to stop aiming a weapon at your superior officer?" He said lowly.

McCallister remained still for a moment before lowering the Gunblade, though the suspicion in her eyes remained. "How are you here?"

He lowered his hands to his sides, "I was hoping you would have some ideas about that." He took a sideways step, careful to keep a wary eye on her. "I've been trying to find the rest of the squad since I woke up—"

"Woke up."

"There's something…off…about this ship. That creature…that shadow that we saw, right before the floor collapsed…And these energy surges…" Leon looked around, scanning the engine room. "What have you found?"

She was still staring mistrustfully at him when he returned his gaze to her. She held his stare for an uncomfortable moment before shifting. "Banks unlocked the logs on the Flight Deck. This ship wasn't abandoned or taken by mutiny. It was overpowered. Everybody's dead. Killed each other or were bled dry: I haven't figured that out yet. I think the creature feeds on hearts…but that doesn't make sense…Why would the ship still be flying if the shadows fed on heart energy?"

McCallister was babbling, and Leon stared at her. She looked like she had been through Hell…however much Hell a person could endure in…how much time had passed since he had last seen her? Two hours? Four? Definitely not long enough for her to get that collar scar.

"The creature? What is it?" He asked. "You found Banks? What about Lolly?" He pressed. "Did you follow the bloody arrows on the walls?"

She stared dryly at him. "Banks is MIA. Lolly told me about the logs. He disappeared after the second surge." She narrowed her eyes, her hand flexing around the hilt of Leon's Gunblade. "So did you."

Leon kept a wary attention on her. She wasn't right. She wasn't stable, but she was talking. If he could keep her talking, maybe they could sort out this mess and get their details straight.

"I fell through the floor during that weird energy surge. That…thing attacked us. Then I woke up in the hangar surrounded by dead bodies, and there were two people…Have you seen any other survivors on board?" He asked.

Her expression became stony. "I searched the hangar after you fell through it. All I could find was this." She rotated her wrist holding the Gunblade. "No dead bodies. No other survivors. I backtracked to the Flight Deck and found Lolly." Her voice changed tone at the recruit's name, but she didn't hesitate as she went on. "We searched for you for hours." She barked. "Then you just showed up in the armory three days later—"

Leon lifted a hand, cutting her off at that.

"What?" He asked.

She exhaled heavily and straightened, "—you disappeared again almost immediately after that and…two months later…You can't be alive." Her eyes widened as though she was just dawning on something. "Who are you?" She lifted the Gunblade in his direction again. "If you're part of that…that thing…"

Leon's head spun. Three days…followed by two months? What was wrong with her? She clearly looked like she had been trapped here for two months, but they had only been on this ship for four hours at the absolute maximum. Her mind was compromised. Trauma or space dementia had taken hold of her.

"You're not making any sense, McCallister." He said slowly. "Our squad docked with this ship less than six hours ago. It has to be less than six hours: The World That Never Was's base was going to blow this place from orbit after six hours, remember?"

She looked at him for a split second, and then she smirked. The blue light from the energy core glinted off her eyes as she started laughing at him. It was a hoarse, throaty laugh, and it was cut off abruptly as she glared at him.

"Where have you BEEN?!" She took an unsteady step to the left. "You disappeared!" She pointed at him. "The squad fell apart. The darkness is hunting us. There is no escape from this ship!"

Hysteria had taken her over. She was suffering from space dementia; it was the only thing that explained why she thought they had been on this ship for two MONTHS. Leon lifted his hands placatingly. This was going to have to be handled delicately or she would snap entirely.

"Tabaeus." He went with her first name to get her attention, as he rarely ever referred to her as such. "Look at me."

"You're dead." She barked, swinging the Gunblade aimlessly around her person. "I saw you die. I watched you die. Twice." She lifted two fingers. "Is this a joke?" She glared up at the ceiling. "Is this some kind of joke, you damned darkness?! You're trying to break me, IS THAT IT?!"

"Get a hold of yourself, woman." Leon raised his voice.

The walls and floor around them trembled.

The blue energy from the ship's core flickered, and a loud, yawning moan reverberated through the air. It was happening again. Every time the ship shook like this, his surroundings changed. Blood appeared and disappeared from the walls. Bodies and dust and debris appeared and disappeared. He couldn't assume that McCallister would still be here when the surge ended. He couldn't assume that HE would still be here when the surge ended.

"Why did you come here? To the engine room?" He demanded over the hiss of air as it whistled through the chamber.

McCallister looked at him, and the crazed glint in her eyes faltered. "Because you told me to before you disappeared, sir." When the ground jerked violently under their feet, she staggered. "Not again! Sir, I can't make it stop…" She gestured to the lit control panels.

Leon side stepped to maintain his balance as the surge worsened. The air around him felt electrified. "Just hang on." He tried to move toward her. "If we get separated, I'll find you again. Just stay alive and hang on. That's an order, private."

Blue light flooded the engine room and blinded him.

"You can't be here." She whispered.

"_Banks, respond! Lolly!" Leon barked into the communicator, but there was no reply._

_Private McCallister stood in front of him, rifle in her hands and watching him anxiously. Leon looked back at her as the silence of the radio droned between them. He cursed and glanced down the hall, where the moving shadow had disappeared when the emergency lights kicked on._

"_Double back to the Flight Deck." He ordered, turning on his heel to backtrack the way they'd come._

_The soldier's boot steps signaled her following him. The ship was empty. Lolly had just reported no signs of life not five minutes ago. But now shadows were moving, and Lolly and Banks had gone MIA over the radio. There was something on this ship, and it was flying under the radar of life scans. Heartless and Nobodies emitted much lower life signs than humans, maybe one of those creatures had managed to survive on this ship._

_Leon and McCallister reached their initial deck and began to follow Banks and Lolly's trail, tracking them to locate the Flight Deck. The dust on the floor was disturbed by their boots, and debris had been shifted to allow them through earlier. The walls of the ship groaned and creaked around them. It sounded like the steel cooling and settling, only more…sentient._

_He pushed it to the back of his mind. His focus at the moment was finding the other half of his squad, making sure they were safe—or making them safe himself—and wrapping up this mission as soon as feasible so they could get the Hell off this ship._

_The ship suddenly listed to the left, and both Leon and McCallister staggered sideways. Leon adjusted his center of gravity to keep his balance, while McCallister put a steadying hand on the wall. The emergency lights flickered, and an almost electrical buzz hummed through the air. It made the hair on the back of Leon's neck stand up, and he looked up and down both ends of the corridor, as though expecting something to be amiss._

_Ships in space often popped and groaned as they settled, the exterior hull plates contracting with the sudden cold of space and ventilation systems kicking in to stabilize the cabin pressure. That shuddering in the floor and walls around them was not the typical noises of a settling ship. _

"_Sir, the shadows." McCallister's voice was low in his helmet radio._

_Leon let his back face her, snapping his eyes to the shadows cast by the emergency lights. Sure enough, the strange, almost visceral movement of the far shadows had returned. The flesh of his shoulders tingled and the bone-deep chill pushed at his skin through the insulated space suit again._

"_It's watching us." She murmured._

_The words had barely left her mouth when the shadows lurched forward. They flowed serpentine away from the corners of the hallway and lunged toward Leon and McCallister. Its movements resembled nothing living that Leon had ever encountered. He lifted his Gunblade defensively to brace himself for the impact of its attack. McCallister snapped her rifle up, aimed, and shot quick-fire rounds at the creature. The rounds echoed like thunder in the steel and metal hallway._

_The black mass of darkness roared animalistically as the bullets peppered whatever it had that resembled flesh. A cold hiss of air sizzled over their heads, and the floor rolled under their feet again. The walls trembled, but Leon could only make a minor note of that in his periphery as he swung the Gunblade at the semi-visible beast. It had no head, no tail, no claws, no mouth, no eyes. It was just…shadow._

_The ship violently listed to the left once more, and a deep snarl of steel sliced through the air. The concrete floor cracked and buckled, and McCallister stopped firing her M15, sidestepping to push her back against the wall. Leon looked down as one of his boots suddenly sank into the shattering concrete._

_He had just enough time to lift his gaze and lock eyes with McCallister. Then, as if in slow motion, the ground under him disappeared and he began to drop._

"_COMMANDER!" McCallister lunged forward, reaching for him._

_Leon joined the broken floor as it toppled into the deck below, and the shadow coursed across the ceiling above McCallister, sweeping down over her as a flash of blue light blinded him. Then everything was darkness._

When the blue light faded, Leon blinked and found himself still in the engine room. The lit monitors on the control panel wall were dim. The supply bags were gone. Private McCallister was gone.

"Shit." Leon cursed, turning in a slow circle.

The Glock was gone. So was his Gunblade. He was now completely unarmed and alone, again. He hastened over to the bars surrounding the energy core. The column extended several stories down into the ship's belly, and the bright blue energy source was roiling and undulating around itself as it pulsed. He shoved himself away from the bars in frustration.

"McCallister." He yelled, spinning to face the engine room again. "Private McCallister!" he yelled more loudly. "Tabaeus McCallister!"

The echo of his voice rang to silence, and he cursed, standing in the middle of the room blankly and, for a brief moment, helplessly. Gritting his teeth, Leon crossed over to the doors where he had entered the room earlier. Shoving the doors open, he stepped heavily out into the corridor. There was no blood on the walls, no arrows pointing toward the engine room. There were no bodies either. Just dust and emptiness.

Two months. She had said that he had been missing for two months. Impossible, of course, but he had always known McCallister to be a very level headed and logical soldier. For something to rattle her so deeply that her mind's only coping mechanism was to construct a two month long entrapment on this ship…At the same time that his best soldier was suffering hysteria, Leon was constantly torn between two environments on this vessel.

Was that happening to him now? Was he hallucinating? Which was the delirium: the blood soaked hallways or the empty ones? There was no figuring it out at the moment. He needed to find his squad and evacuate this ship. Something was wrong with it; they still had no idea what that dark shadow was. He pushed the thoughts aside and began to backtrack the way he'd come. At least the outlay of the ship hadn't changed. It seemed to be the only consistency.

He'd moved two floors and was heading up another hallway when sounds of movement hit his ears. He paused. He had no weapon, no gun, and no idea what he was up against. It could be Banks or Lolly, injured, or it could be that…creature. Leon drew a deep inhale and exhaled slowly before tracking the noise back to the armory. The door was ajar, and he immediately noted that the room was no longer empty. Weapons were stacked on the shelves and lining the walls. Pistols, handguns, rifles, shotguns, artillery, grenades, flash-bangs, knives, swords: there was a plethora of weaponry waiting in the fully-stocked room.

A person stepped into his line of sight from the hallway: wearing dark clothes and not immediately recognizable. It was a male person, with a muscled build and covered in dirt and grime. Leon slipped into the room and kept his eyes on the strange man's back. He was replacing the clip in a handgun, back turned to Leon. Leon spotted an oversized bowie knife on the shelf at his elbow, and he snatched it up, paused, and then grabbed the loaded pistol that was resting beside it.

This had to be one of the two survivors that he had seen during the first surge when he woke up. Suspicion crawled up his neck as he watched the man begin loading all of the weapons from the armory into a set of duffel bags, making hardly any noise at all while still moving quickly. He moved like a soldier, like he'd had training.

Feeling slightly more confident now that he was armed, Leon stepped away from the wall and raised the weapon, aiming it at the man's back.

"Who are you?" He announced himself.

The man seemed to simultaneously spin around to face him, drop into a squat and raise his freshly loaded weapon to aim at Leon's face. The expression on his grime-coated face was almost feral, and the tattered and weathered clothes on his lean form only added to that image. But instead of firing, the man's eyes widened as he stared at Leon.

"You're a survivor." Leon remarked calmly. "Who are you? How long have you been on this ship? Have you seen any—"

Rather than replying, the man canted his head and let out a shrill whistle. In response, more movement started up near the back of the armory, and Leon inwardly cursed. If there were more survivors, and the ship had driven them all mad, what chance would he stand at talking to them reasonably and getting this sorted out?

That concern didn't last long, as the man stood out of his squat just as Tabaeus McCallister emerged from the back, her old M15 back in her hands. Leon nearly dropped his gun in surprise. Most of the grime and sweat that she had been wearing in the engine room was gone, as was the scar running laterally across her shoulders. Just…gone, not fifteen minutes after he'd seen her in a half-crazed state.

She audibly gasped when she saw him and trained her rifle on him. "Sir?"

"McCallister?" He gaped. "The Hell is going on?"

She involuntarily lowered the barrel of her gun from aiming at his chest, and Leon abruptly noticed his Gunblade hanging from her belt. When he had seen her in the engine room, she had said that she found it while looking for him after his fall through the floor. She didn't look nearly as rough as she had there, though. She looked at the man next to her. "Stand down. It's him."

The man narrowed his eyes and reluctantly lowered his gun.

"How are you alive?" McCallister asked Leon. "We searched for you but you were gone."

"We? Who?" He gestured to the stranger.

"Lolly found me after the first surge three days ago." McCallister explained.

Lolly? Private Chris Lolly?

Leon slid his eyes from McCallister to the feral-looking man. Now that she had pointed it out, Leon realized that it was Chris Lolly…but not the same Chris Lolly who had sputtered like an idiot on the Gummi ride to this vessel. The man stood like a boulder, shoulders flat, lips pursed, eyes dark, unspeaking.

"Three days." Leon snapped his attention back to McCallister.

So she was clearly still compromised. As was Lolly apparently.

McCallister looked uncertain. "Some of us have been here longer." She gave him a once-over. "How are you alive?" She repeated, eying the bloody splotch on the front of his shirt.

"The ship." Leon blurted. "Blue lights. Energy surges. I think that's what's doing this." Realizing he hadn't answered her question, he faced her. "Whatever is powering this ship is unstable. It's lashing out and every time it does…things change." He looked from McCallister, to Lolly, and back to McCallister. "Banks?"

McCallister's shoulders slumped. "We haven't seen her at all since you and I lost radio contact with her three days ago."

When he had seen her in the engine room, she had insisted that she had seen him in the armory—where he currently was with her—after three days missing, followed by two months. Now she was backtracking, like her hysteria was dragging her back through time. The most disturbing part of it, to Leon, was that she didn't look mad. She seemed completely sane, standing in front of him now, or at the very least much more grounded than she had been in the engine room, before she disappeared with the surge.

"What about the shadows?" He demanded. "Have you seen it since then?"

Lolly abruptly walked away from them, gathering more of the guns in a large duffle bag on one of the tables. It looked like they had been in the process of clearing the place out when he'd found them. McCallister ignored Lolly's movements.

"It's some kind of mutant." She reported. "We think it's been here for years—probably what wiped out the original crew in the first place. It's…merged with the ship somehow, like a parasite. It keeps to the shadows, barely corporeal, but bullets have been making some kind of impact on it." She explained. "We just found the armory ten minutes ago."

"Have you been able to access the Gummi or make radio contact with The World That Never Was?" He asked.

She shook her head, "None of the radios work…And…the Gummi is gone."

"Gone—" He started.

The steel around them groaned as the walls trembled.

McCallister swore under her breath and headed for the armory door. "It's coming again. Every time the ship shakes, another surge happens…And that dark creature usually follows."

She began to close the armory door, but the heavy door was suddenly flung open with a gust of warm wind. Leon snatched up the nearest rifle and crossed over to her, leveling the barrel at the hallway and waiting for something to aim at. McCallister regained her balance and reached for her own weapon, but the shadows blew into the armory before she could grab one.

In one fell swoop, the air temperature in the armory dropped violently and the force of the shadows burned across the bare skin of Leon's arms and face. He squinted into it and let off three gunshots at the darkness. The mass shrieked and doubled in on itself, redirecting its trajectory from the faltering McCallister to Leon.

Lolly returned to view, gathering up the remaining guns from the shelves, effectively stripping the place bare, and then he fluidly swung one arm around, slinging a thick knife like a missile at the shadows. The shadows contracted as Leon and McCallister rained bullets into it, and Leon never heard the sound of the bullets slamming into the steel of the hallway, so this monster had to have some kind of tangible mass to it.

Before he could complete the thought, however, the darkness rebounded into the hallway and seemed to spit their bullets right back at them. One of the casings whistled past Leon's shoulder and he ducked and rolled behind one of the empty shelves. Lolly grunted as one of the bullets found him, but Leon didn't have time to assess the man's status.

Among the bullets that the shadows seemed to be regurgitating back at them was the knife that Lolly had slung at it. It twirled through the frigid air at an alarming speed and moved in a blur past McCallister, who cried out and dropped to the floor in shock. Leon braced himself against the shelf and lifted the rifle again, firing into the shadows before abruptly stopping. This thing was just absorbing the bullets and launching them back at them. How were they supposed to—

Lolly, on his knees across the armory, threw a detonated flash-bang at the shadows. As soon as it collided with the floor, it exploded in a flash of blinding white light. Leon shielded his eyes with one arm. The darkness let out a high pitched shriek, and Leon heard Lolly stagger across the armory, followed by the slamming of the armory door.

As the light faded, Leon lowered his arm to see the shadows gone, and only the emergency lights illuminating the room. Lolly was leaning against the door, out of breath and clutching his forearm, which was bleeding moderately. McCallister was pushing herself up off her stomach where she'd landed, blood staining her shirt and dripping to the floor. Finding himself uninjured, Leon dropped the gun and crossed over to her, kneeling down.

"McCallister." He grasped her shoulder and helped her up to her knees.

She hissed in pain and lifted a hand to her chest.

The knife that the darkness had slung at her had sliced a clean line across her collar bones, deep enough to draw a disconcerting amount of blood. Leon narrowed his eyes, tugging off his combat gloves. McCallister was tugging a handkerchief from her pocket, but her hands were shaking in shock. That knife could have easily sliced two inches deeper, severed arteries, knicked her heart, punctured a lung, and they both knew it.

"You're okay." He remarked absently, taking the cloth from her and pressing it over the deeper part of the laceration.

He could feel her heart racing, and she immediately took over applying the pressure to her wound. Leon pulled away and got to his feet, looking to Private Lolly.

"How bad off are you?" He asked.

Lolly had already torn off one of his sleeves and had wrapped it around the source of the bleeding. Still without a word, the man went to gather up the rest of the guns.

"What did you mean, the Gummi is gone?" Leon asked, taking up one of the gun bags.

McCallister stood on her feet, inspecting the bloody state of the cloth. "I meant that it is gone." She looked at him. "The port where we docked is empty."

Leon stared at her for a long moment. That wasn't possible. There was no explanation for their Gummi Ship just up and disappearing. There was no way that it could have dislodged or been detached from the dock…unless those two survivors had stolen it. They had been in the hangar when the original surge hit.

"Banks is still missing." McCallister was saying, dropping the bloody cloth to the floor. "All of her supplies are gone from the bridge. She doesn't have any rations; this was only supposed to be a six hour mission. So she's up shit creek without a paddle, and without any supplies after three days—"

"Why do you keep saying that?" Leon was getting exasperated with that nonsensical talk. "It hasn't been three days. It's been, at the most, four hours."

Both McCallister and Lolly paused, staring at him like HE was the unstable one.

"Sir, trust me." She said, shouldering one of the duffel bags. "It's easy to lose track of time in here. That's the point, I think. It's…it's confusing, but you—the surges—"

"This mission was given a deadline of six hours. After that, the World That Never Was is going to blast this ship out of orbit, probably killing everyone on board in the process." Leon said adamantly. "I don't know what's gotten into your head to make you think that it's been three days, but I guarantee you that I haven't been running around this damn craft THAT long."

"No, sir, I doubt you have been." McCallister was uncomfortably calm. "You really don't know what's going on, do you?"

Leon stared hard at her for a long moment, his eyes drifting to the line of red across her collar. It was no longer bleeding, but it was deep, and a few drops of blood were oozing out of the laceration. The image of McCallister in the engine room, aiming his Gunblade at him, sputtering nonsense and looking as beaten and grimy as Lolly looked now, and talking like she'd been trapped on this ship for months…She had had a healed-over scar on her chest, EXACTLY like the injury that he had seen her receive not ten minutes earlier.

"You were in the engine room." He said slowly, lifting his gaze back to her eyes. "I saw you."

"Commander," She inhaled. "I have never been to the engine room on this vessel."

"I saw you." He raised a hand, taking a step forward and reaching out, grasping her shoulder absently, making sure she was real. "You attacked me."

Her eyes widened slightly, "That's where the energy core of the ship would be."

"I saw that too." Leon withdrew from her, glancing to Lolly and back to McCallister. "It's a heart."

"What?" She looked over his shoulder in thought. "The blue light…"

"I don't know how or why, but the energy core of this ship is a massive heart." Leon looked to Lolly. "Have you opened the logs that Banks's unlocked?"

McCallister was reeling. "How did you know about the logs?"

Leon rounded on her, "You told me about them in the engine room."

She looked confused.

"You had a scar." He pointed at her wound. "Right there. Healed over."

Her confusion faded from her eyes and she tilted her head. "Sir, I've never—"

"—been to the engine room, I know." Leon ran a hand through his hair.

"Yet." She cut in.

Leon faced her. "What?"

"That's what's happening." She explained.

Lolly opened the armory door, moving out into the hallway to scout and make sure the darkness was gone.

"The energy surges, the differences, the way everything changes after the surges…Whatever is happening on this ship, it's moving the ship and all of us with it." She swallowed. "Whether through dimensions or through a rift or whatever…What you saw, who you saw in the engine room…That was me, but it isn't me _yet_."

Leon drew up short. The blood disappearing and reappearing on the walls. The empty armory suddenly being full of weapons. Their ship vanishing. Seeing McCallister in the engine room. Her account of time disparity. The heart running the entire ship.

"Time travel." He said evenly.

"Nothing else fits." She explained. "You swear you've only been on this ship for a few hours. I KNOW that I've been here for three days. We're—we're going through different timelines. It's the only thing that makes sense. And Lolly—" She cut herself off and started again. "If there's a heart powering this ship, and if it's powerful enough to keep this spacecraft running, then it's not inconceivable to think that it may have been damaged and these energy surges, these fluctuations, are causing tears in the fabric of the continuum."

"It's NOT inconceivable?" Leon snapped. "It's hard enough to believe that there's a heart strong enough to power a ship. Let alone WHY anyone in their right mind would utilize a heart to fuel a ship."

"WE have seen this happen before." McCallister talked over him. "I don't know how it's happening or why, but you and I both know what kind of destruction a damaged heart is capable of. Time travel is not that far-fetched."

She had a point. He hated that.

Leon shook himself and lifted his hands. "Okay, let's go with that train of thought for now until something else makes more sense. Right now you're three days ahead of me, and who knows how long Lolly's been trapped here, look at him."

"Three years." Came a low, hoarse voice.

Leon and McCallister both glanced back. Lolly was stepping back into the armory.

"1043 days exactly." Lolly muttered again. "Sir."

A thick silence hung in the air around them.

"Holy shit." Leon whispered.

A low, reverberating groan shuddered through the walls. Another energy surge. All three of them froze. The ground and walls around them began to tremble. The intercom suddenly screamed static and an unfamiliar, inhuman voice jarred out of the speaker, though Leon had no idea what was being said. He looked to McCallister and Lolly.

"That's from the Flight Deck." She said, referring to the intercom.

She was going to disappear. Lolly too. Leon didn't know how to stop it.

"Go to the engine room." He ordered. "I'll find you there." In two months… "I'm sorry."

Her composed expression cracked slightly. "Sir—"

Blue light engulfed his vision as the surge hit, and then darkness swamped him again.

**..:-X-:..**

**A/N:** Constructive feedback is always welcome and appreciated!


	3. Part Three

**Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This story is mine, as are the OCs. I hope to wrap this story up over the next two weeks, now that the semester is over and I'll have more time to write. Enjoy the chapter! Constructive feedback is always welcome and appreciated.**

**..:-X-:..**

**Part Three**

The armory was empty when the blue light faded and the surge ended. No McCallister. No Lolly. No weapons. Just a bloody rag on the floor. Leon cast his eyes around with a low curse and then approached the closed armory door. He pushed it open, and the hinges creaked audibly as it moved. Stepping out into the hallway, Leon immediately noted the blood on the walls, no doubt pointing toward the engine room like the others he had seen.

Rather than follow them, he angled down the other end of the corridor, heading in the direction of the Bridge of the ship. He knew McCallister would be in the engine room; he had already seen that she was there…would be there…now, then, later…whatever. First he had to reach the Bridge and figure out what was going on with Banks. Find her, locate the logs that she had unlocked, maybe access more data within this damned ship: anything was better than continuing to run around this vessel and waiting for that shadow to attack or for another surge to displace him.

Leon almost easily reoriented himself and headed up several stairwells until he came to a set of double doors marked 'Bridge.' The entryway matched the rest of the ship's interior: a faded evidence of something that had once been grand and polished, now diminished to dust, rust, and decay. Breathing heavily from the bolt up the stairs, Leon approached the automated doors, but, predictably, they didn't open. With a low curse, he put his hands on them and started to pry them apart by force.

A blue flash illuminated the hallway behind him, and the walls around him shuddered. Leon spun to face the flash just as it faded. A ripple of blue lightning flickered in the air in front of the stairwell door. It quickly fizzled out and died, leaving the air empty as before. Had that been a surge? He looked around. The mess and clutter of the ship was still there. HE hadn't moved, but that had looked like a surge.

What if…what if it was surges, plural? Not one, massive energy wave that swallowed the entire ship, but multiple smaller surges that occurred spontaneously throughout it? That would make more sense as to why he, McCallister, and Lolly were all experiencing different lapses of time. When the blue flash didn't return, he slowly turned back and resumed his attempt to pry open the doors. If he had been here for four hours, McCallister had been here for two months, and Lolly had been here for three years…Where was Banks?

The doors groaned and screamed in protest as he finally got a grip on them and shoved them open. As soon as the door opened, another blue flash forked into the air in front of him, and the familiar sensation washed over him, like a bucket of ice water. The surge shoved him forward and spat him onto the floor of the Bridge.

"Leonha—" The voice abruptly cut off.

Leon rolled with the momentum and let muscle memory kick him back onto his feet in a crouch. He gagged slightly and looked up. The Bridge was grimy and cluttered like before; had that been a real surge? Had he moved? When—

"Holy ball sack! Leonhart?!" The voice barked.

Leon's eyes landed on Major Valerie Banks, standing in front of the main control panel in the center of the large room. She had a gun lifted and aimed at him, though her eyes were wide through her space helmet visor.

Leon automatically lifted his hands palm outward. "This—"

Another blue flash ballooned in the corner of the room, and they both started in surprise. The fork of pale lightning railed against the dusty wall, and all of the monitors on the control panels went to static.

"Banks? Major Banks!" A voice barked over the radio on Banks' suit.

Leon felt his stomach flop as he recognized that as HIS voice.

"Lolly! Respond, dammit." That was HIM…five hours ago…

He had truly gone back in time.

Adrenaline flooded his veins, and Leon fluidly slid over to the panel, Banks gawking at him in disbelief. He reached up and disconnected the transmitter on Banks' radio. Her response was to grab the front of his shirt and jam the barrel of her gun into his collar bone.

"What the fucking hell are you?" She snarled.

Leon grimaced at the pressure on his neck. "It's me, Leonhart."

She jerked her head toward the radio. "THAT was Leonhart. You're a shade." She looked him up and down. "You're not wearing a suit. I'm not stupid."

"The life support systems are online." Leon didn't shove away, knowing from experience that he had only a few seconds to convince the woman or she WOULD pull the trigger. "The blue flashes you've been seeing are power surges…portals…somehow…throwing us all through into different realms of time on this ship."

Her eyes were hard, and she pulled back the hammer on the pistol.

"On world MX9, how were you injured?" She demanded.

A validity question: only he would know the answer to that.

"Wolf Heartless bit my leg, ruined my knee." He answered tersely. "It still hurts."

Banks relaxed slightly, lowering her weapon and releasing his shirt. "The fuck, Leonhart?" She gestured to the blood on his shirt front. "Yours?"

"Long story." He muttered, rubbing his collar bone. "You're still here."

"Shit yeah I'm still here. Where else would I be?" She removed her helmet and set it aside, as it was unnecessary. "Why are you here? You're in the corridors with McCallister. And Lolly—" She turned, as though to point him out, but they were alone. "He's…gone."

"There's something on this ship." Leon said impatiently, "How much ammo do you have?"

Banks was quickly climbing out of her spacesuit, and she checked her magazine. "Fully loaded, got two fresh clips. What kinda shit are we dealing with?"

"Shadow. Time travel." He blurted, "We need to get to the engine room."

"What? Why?" Banks blinked.

"That's where I told McCallister and Lolly to meet me after we got separated by another energy surge. This whole ship is being powered by a heart."

"You're shitting me."

Leon shook his head, heading for the doorway to leave the Bridge. "No, I'm not."

"How the fuck does a heart even—a human heart? You're sure?" She said, crossing over to the wall beside the Bridge door.

He nodded, "I saw it myself. It's too massive to be a human heart. I think it's the heart of a world, a planet's heart."

"Holy whore." She spat, wrapping the jacket of her uniform around her elbow and approaching the box on the wall with the label 'In Case of Emergency, Break Glass.' "How does that even fucking work?"

The ship shuddered again, and Leon cursed.

"We don't have time to argue logic. What are you doing?" He demanded.

Without replying, Banks smashed her elbow into the case, effectively breaking the glass. Knocking the shards clear with her jacket, Banks reached her other hand inside and retrieved the red bladed fire ax that was hanging inside.

"You said we're fighting shadows." She muttered at his flat look. "Satan himself could be jacking around out there. I'm not taking any chan—"

The ship listed to the left suddenly, and another energy surge screamed across the Bridge. Leon instinctively ducked, and the sound made the hair on his neck stand up. The surges had never made that noise before. It was always just static and a rumble. There was no blue flash, either. The fork of red lightning flashed only once, and then it was spreading open, and a gust of wind was being sucked into it. It was like a giant bloody mouth, yawning overhead.

"C'mon." He maneuvered toward the door, grabbing onto the bolted down control panel to fight against the hurricane-like wind that had suddenly erupted in the Bridge.

Over the roar of the wind, he heard Banks scream, and he turned just in time to see Banks lose her grip on the part of the panel that she had latched onto. The wind whipped her clear into the air and sucked her into the red vortex.

It was a vortex. This was Leon's first time seeing it as an outsider, without the surge happening TO him. It was swallowing the woman whole; crimson vines of jagged lightning were wrapping themselves around her body and dragging her into the vortex. He didn't have time to ogle, and he was halfway to the screaming portal, reaching for Banks's closest limb that he could reach, when the soldier slipped away, like smoke, and vanished into the undulating red lightning. Then, just like that, the vortex closed in on itself and disappeared. She was gone.

Leon stood alone on the empty Bridge.

"Banks?" He balked.

What. The HELL. Was that?

He blinked twice before stepping over to the empty air where Banks had been just seconds earlier. His insides churned. This wasn't right. None of this was right. All of the surges that he had endured had been like tripping and falling through a rain of icy water. It was instantaneous. That…Banks had been devoured, and it had been slow. There would be chasing after her. He would have to wait for her to resurface. Like Lolly. Like McCallister.

He narrowed his eyes and approached the control panel. There were various monitors beaming up at him. Most of them were dark, but Banks had diverted enough power to start up the monitors showing security footage of the port side of the ship where their Gummi was docked. Leon squinted at the screen and clearly saw their ship.

McCallister had told him that Banks had unlocked the logs and Lolly had told her what they contained. She had also said that their ship was gone, missing, during the surges. Maybe at some point she had gone through a surge that took her to a time when their Gummi wasn't present. But it was back now. If they could avoid the surges until they got to the ship—

More static blared over the intercom speaker, and again it echoed with an animalistic screech, like a voice trying to claw its way out of a foreign throat. It made his chest constrict, and Leon stared at the intercom until it silenced. The situation was escalating. He had to get to the engine room like he'd promised McCallister. Banks was gone; there was no following her. He didn't even know where she was, no idea where to start looking. If she had been moved through space as well as time, she could have been anywhere on the ship…or off the ship.

He gritted his teeth angrily at the ridiculousness of the situation and left the Bridge. He was halfway across the ship when the bloody arrows began to show up once more: aged, darkened black, and crudely drawn, pointing toward the engine room. He knew the way without them at this point.

More flashes of blue lightning and shuddering groans of the ship appeared on either side of him in increasing frequency as he neared the engine room. Whatever was happening on this ship, it was getting worse. Something was making the surges happen faster and more chaotically, and in smaller, contained zones.

The lower sections of the ship were quieter, and he shoved open the engine room doors, not sure what he was about to find. He was not prepared for what he saw.

A blue flash was unfolding out of the air in the center of the room, and it was swallowing someone in the middle of the room, whose back was turned toward Leon. It was…HIM. Leon of an hour ago was vanishing, his back facing Leon of now, and McCallister was keeping the Gunblade trained on him.

Just as the light was pulling the other Leon through the surge, McCallister's eyes drifted from his past self to stare at his present self. Her eyes widened.

"You can't be here." She murmured.

The flash ended abruptly, and Leon continued to gawk. He had just seen himself get pulled through a time vortex. It took a moment to comprehend that. McCallister—sweaty, scarred, hysterical McCallister—kept the Gunblade up, keeping him in her sights now. She had been here for two months under his orders, and it had taken its toll.

He lifted his hands. "It's me."

"That's what the other you just said." She snapped warily. "He seemed pretty sincere."

"That was me too." He took a careful step toward her. "The surges are rips in the time continuum, remember? You told me that."

"Yeah, two months ago." She growled, "the same time you told me to come here and wait for you, you son of a bitch."

Guilt lanced through him at that, but he kept a stiff upper lip.

"Private McCallister, as your commanding officer, I order you to lower the weapon." He said, stern yet all too aware that he was unarmed if she proved hostile and unstable.

The woman remained still for a moment, staring daggers at him. "How did I get this scar?" She jammed her thumb at the line across her collar bones.

Another validity question, just like Banks.

"The shadow threw Lolly's knife back at you." He answered, lowering his hands back to his sides. Then, for his own reassurance, "What's your biggest hobby?"

"I fold paper cranes." She answered curtly. "Who was the best man at your wedding?" A second question, ever the thorough soldier.

"No one." Leon replied. "We eloped…What tattoos do I have?"

"You don't have any tattoos."

"How would you kn—"

"I've seen you naked." She snapped. "Land of Dragons mission, two years ago, the strip down after we were all exposed to poison dust." She smirked. "What about me?"

Leon frowned. "A cursive 'J' on the left side of your chest. Satisfied? It's me, McCallister, we don't have time for—"

McCallister exhaled. "What was the first order that you ever gave to me?"

Shit. Leon frowned. That had been over five years ago.

"I ordered you to use a Thunder Spell to re-start a soldier's heart. You nearly blasted your own hand off in the process." He squinted one eye as he tried to remember that moment.

McCallister stared hard at him for a long moment. Then her posture relaxed and she reversed her grip on the Gunblade, offering it to him handle first. "Where have you been?"

Leon took his weapon back in relief. "It's still only been five hours for me. I was hurtling through different surges. Sorry it took so long." He muttered.

She grunted and retrieved the silver Glock handgun that he had dropped earlier when he was transported away from her. She slid the clip back into the base and shoved it into her belt.

Leon canted his head, "Did you call me a son of a bitch?"

"I didn't know it was really you, sir."

"You've never called me that."

"Two months."

"Fair point." Leon snorted, glancing toward the eerie glow of the power core across the room behind the bars. "Lolly?"

She shook her head and raised her eyes to his. "Banks?"

He pursed his lips and shook his head negative. "I found her briefly, but a surge took her. A red surge, not a blue one. Have you seen the shadow creature anymore?"

"What do you think I've been doing for these two months?" She said, crossing over to the supply bags that she had lumped together in her makeshift camp. "The bodies you mentioned earlier…I found some of them. Treasure seekers. Bounty hunters. Some poor idiots trying to pirate the ship. That…that shadow or darkness or whatever it is…it killed them."

Leon absorbed that, remembering the bodies in the hangar, all in various states of decomposition. He followed McCallister to the supply bags and noted that around half of the munitions from the armory were still accounted for. Her 'camp' consisted of three bags of weapons and ammunition from the armory, a flimsy cardboard box of rations, and a cot. She had stationed herself here for two months on his order, and she was barely surviving.

McCallister rifled through her ammo bag to find more magazines for the Glock. As she straightened, she plucked a canteen from the cardboard box and offered it to Leon.

"Five hours." She said absently.

Leon took the canteen and unscrewed the lid. "Two months?" He countered, lifting the canteen to his lips and taking a deep swallow of water. It tasted slightly metallic, but he hadn't realized how thirsty he was, so he ignored the taste.

McCallister snorted. "I've been keeping an eye on the surges. They've been happening all over the ship." She gestured vaguely to the flickering monitors on the panel behind her. "I've been studying the size and duration of each of them. The faster they are, the more closely into the future or past they send you. If the surge flickers for a longer period of time, you could wind up a lot further ahead or behind your true time. I'm guessing you've had the latter experience."

Leon handed the canteen back. "And the former is truer for you."

She grunted, taking her own drink from the canteen before closing it and dropping it back in the box. "I've figured out how to avoid them."

"Earlier…with—" He waved over to where the other Leon—from several hours ago—had vanished. "—you mentioned that you thought the dark creature here was messing with you. Have you been hallucinating?"

"Have you?" She lifted an eyebrow. "I've been living next to a planetary heart and fighting shadows for two months. I think I've earned the right to a few hallucinations." At his persistent stare, she sighed, rubbing her eyes with her thumb and index finger. "I can tell what's reality and what's not, sir."

Leon studied her for a moment but let it go. She wouldn't withhold any information if she thought her mind was compromised. He pondered her words and looked toward the center of the room, where the column extended to the bowels of the ship. The energy core of this ship was a heart. That confirmed his fear.

Why was a world's heart powering this ship? Who would think to use something so massive and uncontrollable as an energy source? Never mind the completely unfeasible parameters that would be needed to keep it stabilized…The fact of the matter was that someone had destroyed a planet to obtain this heart. The idea was barbaric.

"What about the shadows?" He looked back to the soldier. "That creature…"

Gunfire suddenly erupted in the hallway, splitting through the silence of the ship like a bolt of lightning. Leon spun to face the doorway, but at some point McCallister had closed and locked the double doors again. He could see the flashes from the gunshots through the seams of the door, however, and he hitched up his Gunblade to investigate.

"No." McCallister leaned over, grabbing his elbow to stop him. "It's Lolly."

"Lolly—You said you lost contact with him." Leon rounded on her.

"It's not…the right Lolly." She said awkwardly.

Leon narrowed his eyes and looked over her shoulder at the monitor showing the security camera feed from the hallway. Sure enough, there was a man running through the halls, armed with two handguns and fleeing something that the camera wasn't picking up on. The man was Lolly, all right, but without the haunted look in his eyes and the grimy, beaten body.

"When Lolly found me two months ago, he said it was the first time he'd seen me in nearly three years." McCallister replied, releasing his elbow. "THAT Lolly out there has only been here for a few months, at most. I can't interfere with the pattern. He'll be gone in a few minutes, another surge will take him."

Leon frowned at her. "How often does this happen?"

"Daily." She replied flatly, staring at him.

Then, when he didn't ask any more about the situation, she picked up one of the weapon bags, cramming as much ammunition as possible into it before slinging it over her shoulder. She picked up a second bag and handed it to him. It was full of homemade explosives.

"Now you're here. We need to go." She said plainly.

"You were going to cut me in half when I showed up here earlier." Leon took the bag. "What are these for?"

"You weren't the you I was waiting for, sir." She replied. "You were babbling about waking up and survivors and you didn't even know about the time rifts."

"You accused me of being a hallucination from the darkness." He muttered. "You attacked me first, remember?"

"Just—" She stopped herself, exhaling in frustration. "If you're here, that means it's time to move. I've memorized the surge patterns from here to the port where our Gummi is docked."

"You told me it was gone." He pressed.

"It WAS gone WHEN I told you that. Surges have happened since then. It's back now." She said, as though that was all there was to it. "We'll find Lolly around the port side of the hangar; that's where the surges are most frequent."

"And Banks? Have you seen any red surges?" Leon asked.

"A few, but only around the Bridge and Flight Deck area." She answered, walking with him to the back exit of the engine room. "They're more violent than the regular blue ones. I have no idea what they mean, or where Banks is. We'll have to find her on the way."

The possibility that they may not find Banks in time hung unspoken in the air between them, but McCallister was opening the engine room doors, so Leon had to put it on the back burner. He gripped the Gunblade with both hands and angled it low. McCallister took point, sliding out into the hallway. Her eyes flickered down either side of the corridor, running mental calculations on the predictability of the energy surges. Leon followed her lead, keeping careful eyes on the shadows in case any of them moved unwarranted.

Their footsteps were muted by the dust and grime on the floors, but at the same time they seemed amplified in the screaming silence of the hallway. It was making his ears ring. Leon eyed the wall as they passed it. The bloody arrows had returned, splashed across the wall with a wavering hand. The emergency lights in the ceiling overhead cast an eerie glint across the bright red blood, and Leon grimaced. It was fresh.

"McCallister, have you seen who did this?" He gestured to the wall. "It's still wet."

"Sir—" She said impatiently.

"Every time I've passed through here, these arrows have either been gone or they've been aged black. This is fresh blood. Whoever smeared this is probably still here." He pointed out. "Earlier…a lot earlier…I told you about the survivors who saved me and gave me that Glock. Have you found anyone else alive on this ship that isn't from our squad?"

McCallister paused briefly and straightened, looking at the bloody arrows. "I can't monitor everything at all times. I haven't seen who or what put those there." She pointed, "And figuring it out isn't going to get us to the Gummi dock any faster."

The last word crossed her lips with a visible puff of warm breath. Leon narrowed his eyes; the sudden drop in temperature washed over them both then. Her eyes lifted from where she could see her breath and met his gaze.

"It's here." She whispered.

The emergency lights around them flickered and then all abruptly went dark, throwing them into blackness. The cold seeped through their clothes, and a tingle ran up his spine. As vision was lost, he strained his ears to pick up the slack and planted his feet to detect any vibrations in the floor. He could feel McCallister close, barely hear her breathing, and he reached out to keep track of her. His knuckles brushed her elbow. They both stilled, and Leon, try as he might, couldn't get his eyes to adjust to the darkness. If McCallister's rigidity was any indication, she was just as blind as he was.

Maybe not quite so blind. She had to have a better working knowledge of which way was which than he did, given that she had spent two months monitoring and scouting the ship. They could still find their way to the port if she could keep her bearings. If they—

The intercom screamed to life with a buzz of static and an animalistic shriek. The sound stabbed at the ears, and a whistle of something icy moved past Leon's side

"Fira." Leon snapped the spell into the palm of his hand, illuminating the corridor.

A face loomed out of the shadows, pale like dead flesh, and with bulging yellow eyes that were set below a cracking, splintering forehead. The jaw was hanging open, and sharpened teeth were snapping at the flames, leaning through the fire and aiming for his throat. Leon back stepped and shoved the fire at the creature, but it recoiled.

The Fire Spell died and darkness swallowed them for just a second before McCallister grunted, backing into him. Gunfire exploded from the weapon in her hands, and the accompanying powder flash flickered in the hallway like brief flashes of lightning. Leon spun to face what she was shooting at, and he felt the shadow slide across his shoulder blades. It was shadow; it was everywhere.

But it had had a face this time. He had seen it. There was something tangible about it; but did they have enough time to find out?

One of McCallister's bullets found that tangible something, and the shadows screamed. It sounded like nails on a chalkboard, but Leon could almost discern a human quality to it this time. They had managed to deal a blow to it, but they hadn't killed it. They had just made it angry.

"Firaga!" Leon slung the amplified spell at the shadow where McCallister's bullet had hit.

The fire caught on something flammable and spread, ballooning over the coiled darkness and wrapping itself around something in the shape of a torso. The flames reached up and licked at that stretched, distended jaw, the sharp teeth glinting in the firelight and those yellow eyes locking onto the weapon in McCallister's hands.

The soldier resumed her shooting, peppering the creature with bullets. Leon saw the slugs punch into the shadows, but something was different this time. In the armory, the shadow had swallowed the bullets and regurgitated them back at Leon, McCallister, and Lolly. Suddenly, the bullets were doing damage? Was the shadow weaker now? How? Why?

The shadow recoiled into itself, and McCallister ejected her spent clip, solidly sliding a loaded one into the bottom of the gun. Before she could shoot, Leon's Fire Spell faded and the corridor was cast into blackness again. Leon flexed a fist. He was running low on ether. They couldn't keep lighting the hallway in piecemeal bursts.

"Thunder!" McCallister barked.

Lightning forked out of her open palm, illuminating her arm and her face, and the rest of the corridor as it rushed to meet the monster. The spell smashed into the steel wall of the hallway, but the shadow was gone.

"Shit." He cursed. "Let's go. Now."

McCallister half turned and reached out as the spell faded and the blackness claimed the hallway once again. The silence rejoined it, and nothing happened. Her hand found his wrist and pulled him forward suddenly down the hallway. Leon quickly fell in line after her, returning the hold on her hand as she led the way through the darkness, turning a sharp corner as they made their way in darkness to the Gummi port.

An explosion suddenly threw the ship violently to the left, and both Leon and McCallister slammed into the wall from the motion. A dozen screams erupted in the halls around them, as though ghosts were trying to claw their way back into the land of the living. The screams died quickly, and a blue flash flickered in Leon's periphery.

"It's getting worse." McCallister groaned, straightening from the wall and grabbing his wrist again. "C'mon." She darted around another corner.

A wall of stale air hit them as they entered the new hallway, and it was so powerful that Leon could taste the metal and blood in the air. McCallister coughed but kept going forward, tripping here and there in the unfamiliar.

"The port should be just up ahead." She grunted. "There'll be more surges now."

"Is the ship under attack?" He asked. "That explosion was a missile hit. The World That Never Was must be—"

Another explosion sounded. Only this one blasted through a wall in an adjacent corridor. The gush of warm air that rushed down the hallway to the meet them was equally stale, but it carried with it the distinct smell of gunpowder. A blue flash zigzagged through the air on their left, quickly dying and taking some of the smoke from the explosion with it.

Voices crashed in the afterbirth of the explosion, barking and snapping as footsteps ripped apart the ringing silence that had encompassed the ship for so long. Light burst through the darkness of the corridor, and the beams of flash lights cut through the air and into Leon and McCallister's eyes.

"Kill them all." A low, gravelly voice ordered.

A bullet immediately whistled past Leon's ear, clanging against the pipes in the wall behind him. He ducked and shoved McCallister around the corner wall as more bullets rained on them.

"Stop! We're Alliance!" Leon barked.

When the gunfire didn't cease, he cursed and threw out an arm.

"Stopraga."

The magic froze the scene in place. The gunmen were paralyzed in their firing positions, and the bullets were left lodged in the air. McCallister peered past Leon at the strangers.

"Allied uniforms." She pointed out. "SWAT team."

More gunfire was sounding down the opposite end of the corridor. There was another squad of Allied SWAT apparently.

"HOLY MOTHER OF FUCK." Major Valerie Banks's voice cut through.

Leon and McCallister swiveled to see Banks staggering to a halt, in full SWAT uniform and an assault rifle in her hands. Her visor was down, but her eyes were wide through the glare.

"Banks?" Leon balked.

"What the ever-loving shit are you doing here?" Banks screamed. "You can't be here—"

A single gunshot exploded in the corridor. Blood splattered forward from a sudden bullet hole in the major's forehead, and Banks's body jerked to the side with the shot, collapsing in a dead heap on the floor.

The Stopraga Spell faded, and a blue flash swallowed them.


	4. Part Four

**Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This story is mine, as are McCallister, Lolly, and Banks. After this, just one more chapter to go. We're in the home stretch. Constructive feedback is welcome and appreciated!**

**..:-X-:..**

**Part Four**

As the blue flash ended, the familiar icy crash was disrupted by a scalding heat that slammed across Leon's arm, where Private McCallister had grabbed him when Banks was shot in front of them. Nausea slammed through his torso, and Leon doubled over as he staggered free of the surge's grip. His knees buckled, and he jerked away from McCallister's touch. She recoiled simultaneously, hissing as her hand burned from the contact.

McCallister.

Leon straightened, shoving the nausea aside, and faced the soldier. "You're here."

They were alone in the hallway. The bullets, the SWAT team, and Banks were all gone. The emergency lights were back online, and McCallister stood a few feet away from him, nursing her burned palm and staring back at him with wide eyes.

"You're still here." She whispered back. "How?"

Through every surge, through every blue flash, and through every change in the ship, Leon had always found himself alone afterward. This time he and McCallister had moved through the surge together. He looked down at the red patch of skin on his arm: a mild burn where McCallister had been holding onto him when Banks was shot. Touch. That was it. You only took what you had with you when the surge took you. That seemed to apply to humans too.

The soldier appeared to reach the same conclusion as he did, but neither dwelled on it too long. They couldn't. The ship shuddered around them. He angled the Gunblade ahead of him and glanced up and down either end of the hallway. McCallister regripped the silver Glock with both hands, and mimicked his perimeter scan for herself.

Footsteps echoed down the hallway on Leon's left. Both he and McCallister swung to face the corridor in unison. He lifted his Gunblade, and she aimed the gun at the darkness. A blue flash briefly lit the corridor behind them, but it was too far away to pull them in. Instead, they faced the darkness, waiting for the footsteps to reach them.

"Who goes there?" Leon demanded. "Show yourselves. This is Commander Leonhart of the Alliance."

The footsteps slowed until two figures stumbled into the cold light of the emergency bulbs overhead. One was a man, ragged and disheveled and built like a truck. The other was a woman in uniform. Both were covered in grime and sweat.

It was Lolly and…Banks.

Both lifted their weapons when they saw Leon and McCallister: Lolly with a machete, Banks with that same red fire ax, only now coated with something like blood. Banks lowered her weapon first as she recognized Leon and McCallister.

"Fucking Hell." She panted, out of breath as her posture relaxed. "How did you get here?"

McCallister gawked, but Leon held his weapon steady.

"Surge." He replied tersely. "Just like the hundreds of blue energy pulses that have been occurring in this ship." He narrowed his eyes at her. "How did you get here? I saw you disappear in that red surge." _I just saw you die._

Banks gave a full body shrug. "I don't have a fucking clue, Leonhart. After…THAT…I saw some messed up SHIT." She side-eyed him abruptly. "You weren't you."

McCallister, who had yet to lower her weapon, chimed in. "Name your direct superior officer."

Banks deadpanned. "Shit's a little too fucked for these validity questions, McCall—"

"Name your direct superior officer." McCallister cut her off.

The taller woman narrowed her eyes. "Cid Highwind." She didn't offer a reciprocal question, and a single raised eyebrow dared McCallister to question further.

McCallister didn't look placated, but she exchanged a short look with Lolly, who bobbed his head in greeting. She lowered her gun.

Leon continued. "You saw another me? From a different timeline."

"No." Banks shook her head, "I wasn't…here. Not on the ship. I was back in Radiant Garden…But it wasn't…right. It wasn't the right Radiant Garden."

"You left the ship?" McCallister asked.

Banks ignored her, pointing at Leon. "You're married." When Leon only quirked an eyebrow at her, she pressed. "But not to Rinoa, right?"

"What? No." Leon blinked. "What does that have to do with—"

"The you I met in that…other place…beyond the red surge…was with Rinoa Heartilly. Tifa was with Cloud. Sephiroth was…sane." Her gaze slid to McCallister, "You didn't even exist."

"Yeah, you'd like that." McCallister grumbled, her gun twitching upward again.

"Stand down." Leon said to the private, facing Banks. "How did you get back?"

"Again, fuck me if I know." Banks shrugged. "All I know is I woke up back on the Bridge. You were gone. Lolly just found me there. We accessed the classified historical logs of this ship."

"And?" Leon pressed.

Banks ran a hand over her disheveled hair. "It's an anomaly. It has all the basic framework and structure of warships pre-dating the Alliance, but it's been outfitted with some seriously anachronistic technology. The whole planetary heart thing? Yeah, this ship wasn't designed to be powered that way. It underwent a full overhaul, but the details of why were deleted from the logs." She nibbled a fingernail. "Best I can figure, it was completely overhauled for the purpose of enabling it to perform time travel."

"Who does it belong to? What army?" Leon asked.

Banks shook her head. "That was erased too. There were a few words, some snippets, nothing that made sense. All I could really get out of it was the name of the ship. The Chasm."

"Chasm?" Leon repeated.

The ship listed sideways, abruptly cutting off conversation and causing all four of them to stumble to the left.

"Are we done?" McCallister snapped, shifting her grip on her shoulder bag. "We have to destroy this place."

"Whoa." Banks lifted a hand. "What happened to escaping?"

Leon pursed his lips. "McCallister's right. The surges are getting worse. We've been pulled through time for hours…years." He glanced at Lolly, who averted his eyes. "Banks, you were pulled into some entire other damn dimension. A planetary heart is powering this ship, and it clearly shouldn't be. We can't wash our hands of this."

"Abomination." Lolly muttered under his breath.

Banks gawked. "All right. Okay. But with what? I'm not exactly packing heat here. Unless one of us is toting around a shit ton of—"

McCallister unzipped her bag, revealing her small stockpile of explosives.

"Well, fuck me." Banks grunted. "So what's the plan?"

The ship quivered again, and Leon glanced down the darkened hallway. The shadow was still roaming the halls; they still had hardly an idea what the creature even was. Blowing the monster up with the rest of ship sounded like a good idea. But they needed to lessen the number of people running around on the ship. The fewer of them running around, the less likely it was that they would get pulled through another surge and get separated.

"The plan." He started. "Banks, Lolly, get to the Gummi. Prepare to detach from the Chasm and book us the Hell out of here." He faced McCallister, "You and I will set the explosives in the Engine Room, set the timers, and then double back through the hangar to the port where the Gummi will be."

The three of them exchanged brief digestive looks and then Lolly nodded.

Banks lifted her axe. "Let's get shit done. How long?"

Leon squinted and looked to McCallister, at her bag of explosives. "One hour."

Banks nodded, and without another word exchanged, she and Lolly turned and headed down the corridor toward the port where the Gummi was docked. Leon shouldered past McCallister down the opposite end of the hallway, and she fell in line after him. They doubled back, making their way to the Engine Room as the ship continued to groan and whine around them.

Blue forks of light branched into the air periodically around them, and Leon picked up the pace until the two of them were nearly running down the hallway. A low groan reverberated through the floor, causing them both to skid to a stop. The sound clawed up the hallway like a moan in a throat, making the pipes in the ceiling shudder and clang against each other.

Deep in the bowels of the spacecraft, something cracked and gave. The floor under their feet trembled violently. The groan persisted and the emergency lights flickered. It sounded like the Chasm was breaking apart or imploding on itself. Leon stared down the hallway. They were running out of time.

The Engine Room was one level down from where they were currently, and still several dozen meters ahead…directly where the ominous sounds were coming from. Leon gritted his teeth and glanced back to McCallister.

Before he could open his mouth, the floor under their boots cracked. They both looked down. A jagged crack had sliced out of the darkened corridor up ahead, forking toward them and fanning out in a web of broken flooring under them. Leon felt the integrity of the floor disintegrate, and he locked eyes with McCallister.

"Back up." He pushed one hand out toward her. "The floor can't handle—"

The tiles underfoot collapsed, and Leon found himself once again sinking through the hole in the floor along with bits of tile and concrete. He gripped the Gunblade like a vise involuntarily and his free hand wrapped around a naked pipe hanging from the broken floor as he dropped past it. A blue flash whirred across the lower hallway that he had half-fallen into.

Leon jerked to an abrupt halt, hanging from the pipe by one arm, and lowered his gaze. The crack in the floor extended through the lower hallway and what looked like several more stories into the ship, possibly all the way to the bottom. The groaning around them intensified but the immediate area began to still. The pipe that he was hanging on began to slide forward, unable to handle his weight with its already-abused body.

He started to glance around to find another grip or a foothold, but then McCallister was there, sprawling on her stomach and reaching down, clapping both hands around his arm and shoulder. The pipe could take it no longer, and it came forward through the splintered concrete. Leon grunted as he dropped a few inches, and McCallister hissed as all of his weight suddenly hung from her upper body.

She wouldn't have the strength to hold him long. Realizing this, Leon glanced down and continued to try and find a foothold or a way to land safely in the lower hallway. The floor around the crack looked shaky at best…capable of crumbling under the slightest weight at worst. With a low curse, he looked back up at the soldier.

"I'm going to try to swing under the floor to the second level. The hole is pretty wide, but I think I can—"

"No." Her face was already red, and the veins in her forehead were bulging with the effort of keeping a hold on him. "The whole floor might collapse."

The jagged edges of the broken floor were pushing against her ribcage where she was leaning over to keep a hold of him. Leon quickly released the useless pipe, reciprocating her grip by wrapping his forearm up around her bicep, trying to find leverage. The pipe clanged as it hit the floors and walls on its way into the bowels of the Chasm. McCallister was breathing in harsh bursts of pain as his weight overextended the muscles in her arms. Her breath was hot on his neck, and he could feel her arm shaking, desperately trying to keep a steady grip.

Thinking fast, he reached up with his sword-arm, swinging the Gunblade up to the safety of the upper floor where McCallister was sprawled. Now with a second free hand, he reached up and gripped the edge of the floor. The broken tiles bit at his skin, and he had to use McCallister's weight as an anchor to lever himself up. She yelped but didn't let go.

Leon managed to claw his way up until his head cleared the floor and he could see the hallway that he had fallen from. McCallister wriggled sideways, angling her body away from him as a counter-balance. She huffed and started to roll backwards, physically dragging him up from the gaping hole in the floor. His grip on the floor began to falter as the tile continued to crumble away.

Adrenaline flooded his veins as his center of gravity started to shift again, and without warning McCallister, Leon pulled on her arm, using her as a balance. He managed to swing one leg up onto the floor, though he couldn't find purchase. He started to skid back again, but McCallister rolled hard, grimacing as she removed one of her arms from his shoulder, causing all of his weight to hang from her left arm. From there, she reached over, hooking her right elbow under his knee and stopping him from skidding.

"Okay." He panted. "If you can hold there, I can climb—"

McCallister wasn't listening. She exhaled hard once and began to pull back, aiming to physically pull him up on her own. Bones in her shoulder loudly and distinctly popped a few inches away from Leon's ear as she did so. She seemed to have entered a fugue state with one thought in mind. And damn it all if she didn't do it. She cried out as parts of the broken tile and concrete dragged across her stomach as she moved. As soon as he could grab purchase on the floor, Leon clawed at the floor, rolled away from the edge, and inadvertently nearly collapsed on top of the woman as they both landed on their stomachs on the unbroken portion of the floor.

For a long moment, they both just lay there, panting. Leon was the first to rise, popping up onto his knees and looking back at what he'd just escaped.

The hole in the floor stretched from wall to wall and had swallowed nearly eight feet of the hallway. There would be no going forward from here. They would have to find an alternate route to the Engine Room.

"Are you all right?" He asked, turning toward McCallister.

The soldier exhaled in a rush and sat up, rubbing her shoulder before also popping up onto her knees, reaching for the bag of explosives. "Fine."

She didn't look it.

"I got those." He swatted her hand away, taking up the bag so she wouldn't further injure her arm. "We'll have to find a way around this."

She nodded with a grimace. Leon frowned and reached out without thinking, briefly grasping the round of her shoulder to make sure it wasn't dislocated. She flinched, and he let go. She rolled the shoulder a few times to uncoil the kinked muscles, giving him a brief nod. He tersely returned it and took up the Gunblade again.

He gestured to the hallway. "Lead the way."

McCallister wordlessly took point, taking them back and then down the first stairway that they came across. Left, right, right, forward, left, double back two lefts, right, right again, and down a long stretch of corridor until they reached the Engine Room doors.

"How's our time?" She asked, knocking open the doors and stepping inside.

Leon glanced at that watch that he had salvaged from his spacesuit. "We have twenty minutes. Let's make this quick."

He moved to the center of the chamber, where the eerie blue glow of the power source crept across the floor and walls, and dropped the bag, rummaging through it and pulling out the piles of explosives.

"All that, and we end up right back here." McCallister grunted, taking two handfuls of the dynamite and hurrying over to the bars that separated the power source from the rest of the chamber.

Leon quickly set his half of the pile of explosives, rigging the triggers to activate remotely by the device that he would keep with his person. Straightening, he glanced over to make a remark to McCallister, but when he turned, he saw an unnatural shadow descending toward her.

"Drop!" He barked, already swinging the Gunblade.

Without looking at him, McCallister fell to her chest on the floor. Leon drove the blade of his sword into the unfurling shadows that descended from the ceiling. The Gunblade sliced through it as though it was smoke, but the shadows let out a wounded scream. Leon followed through with the blow and spun around to deliver a second attack. The shadows recoiled and darted to the left, to throw him off.

McCallister rolled her body away from Leon's feet, and without having to worry about tripping over her, Leon focused on activating the trigger in the Gunblade as the sword peaked in its arc through the second blow. The chambers in the heart of the Gunblade clicked, and the entirety of the blade vibrated as the mechanism activated, doubling the damage.

The scream intensified, and the shadow creature imploded in on itself, splashing the floor like water as it tried to slither away from him. Halfway across the chamber, McCallister was back on her feet, hastily setting the remaining charges from the bag. The creature lurched towards her, and Leon took two steps to the right, casting out an arm.

"Thunder." He roared.

The spell ejected lightning the air between the shadows and the soldier. A branch of jagged fingers from the lightning caressed the darkness, wrapping around the tail of it and illuminating the shadow. A face violently leered out of the shadows. Large empty eye sockets stretched out of the skull-like visage, and those same sharpened teeth chomped at the air as the pale jaw opened wide, screaming at the pain of the spell.

Drops of blackness like blood dribbled to the floor under the creature. It was wounded, maybe dying, but it wasn't slowing down. Leon shifted his stance, keeping the Gunblade level in his hands. The blue light from the energy core flickered, and the ground under their feet trembled. The ship was falling apart as the planetary heart continued to de-stabilize. They were running out of time.

The shadow creature launched forward at him in a counter attack. The shadows seemed to be spilling away from the core of the beast, pooling over grotesque arms and shoulders and flowing down the floor past a gaunt torso and bent legs. The figure under the inky smoke was nearly skeletal, with waxen skin stretched over lumpy bones and joints. There was only enough flesh and tissue to distinguish the creature as a female. A female corpse.

The screaming dropped to a hissing whisper, gurgling out of the creature's throat in a tongue that Leon didn't at first recognize. Only a few words were clear through the raspy voice.

"_Keep…going…Swallow…the…world…whole…"_

The voice rang through the engine room like a cathedral bell and nails on a chalkboard simultaneously.

"What are you?" Leon demanded.

The creature reared and hissed, lashing out its left arm. The coiled shadows under the figure followed at the creature's bidding, rushing towards him. Leon ducked and rolled away, swinging the Gunblade through the attack. The blade sank through nothing, but the smoke dissolved just the same.

Rather than slinking back to rejoin the figure, the shadows pooled at the floor, solidifying into vines that suddenly wrapped around Leon's ankles, yanking his legs out from under him and causing him to hit the floor.

"Fira!" McCallister's spell slammed into the creature's back.

The monster roared in anger and spun on the soldier, whose eyes widened at the sight looming before her. Leon sawed the Gunblade through the dark vines, kicking them away and rolling back up onto his feet. The creature's jaw yawned wide and it screamed. A thickly coiled vine ejected from the monster's chest, jettisoning across the chamber and impaling McCallister just under her collar bone.

The force of the blow flung the soldier off her feet, and the dark vine went taut, shoving her backwards until her back slammed into the wall. The vine pushed completely through her body, and Leon heard bones break and tissue tear as the vine broke out of McCallister's back, digging into the concrete of the wall behind her. McCallister screamed and clawed at the vine, but she was pinned. Dark red blood blossomed out of the wound, copiously staining her shoulder and shirt front.

While the shadow was engrossed in the crimson liquid gushing out of the human woman in its grasp, Leon dashed toward the long hollow column extending to the bowels of the Chasm. He was almost out of ideas, so this last one had to work.

"Aeroga." He dropped the Gunblade, letting it clang to the floor beside him, and lifted both hands, extending his palms through the steel bars.

The wind spell sucked the air from the ceiling of the chamber, rushing down at his command toward the massive blue flickering planetary heart housed in the massive column. Heat sizzled up as the air warmed, but the wind whipped downward, cutting through the outermost atmosphere of the heart. Feeling the tug at the end of the spell like a fish on a hook, Leon took a wide step back, turning to face the beast that was advancing on McCallister. He pushed his last reserves of ether into the wind spell, forcing the wind to whip the severed outermost atmosphere of the heart up, out of the column, through the bars, and directly at the creature.

The blue mist rode the air current, but instead of drifting upward like fire smoke, it abruptly rained downward as though weighed down by stones, colliding with the coiled furls of black smoke around the shadow creature.

It was as though a lit match had touched a line of gunpowder. The creature shrieked as the blue mist connected with the black shadows, igniting the darkness like fire and swallowing the skeletal creature inside it. The monster staggered backwards, withdrawing the lance-like vine from McCallister's body with a sickening squelch before the monster darted away, becoming one with the shadows once more as it retreated out of the Engine Room.

The blue mist faded, spent, and Leon's knees gave out from under him momentarily. He dropped to the floor and landed on his hands and knees, drained from the ambitious spell. It had been reckless and only half-thought through, but it had worked. He blinked hard to force his eyes to retain their focus, then he straightened and hurriedly crossed over to McCallister, who had slumped to the floor and was clutching her shoulder.

"We have to go." He said, meeting her pain-glazed eyes.

He started to lift her, but the soldier grunted her dissent and unsteadily got to her feet, determined to stand on her own.

"The explosives…" She rasped, her voice broken and hoarse.

"Good enough." Leon hastily retrieved the Gunblade, returning to McCallister's side. "We have ten minutes to get to the Gummi. Can you run?"

She nodded, and to her credit, she moved a lot faster than Leon would have thought possible after sustaining such a wound. Not that it helped to slow the bleeding at all. Far from it, it seemed to make it worse, as they left the Engine Room and started to make their way to the hangar. They navigated around the large crack in the multiple floors, when McCallister abruptly skidded to a stop.

"Private." Leon barked impatiently.

She grabbed onto the wall to steady herself, removing the hand that was clutching her shoulder and smearing the blood on the wall in a red, garish line. Leon was tempted to scoop her up and carry her to the Gummi, but his throat clogged when he realized what she was doing.

"You'll need direction," She panted. "…to find us later."

Her hand wavered as she finished writing the bloody letters on the wall, ending with an arrow under the words "Engine Room." That done, she wordlessly faced him, and they continued on.

Every few turns, she would stagger to a stop and paint more of her blood on the walls, drawing an arrow to direct Leon to the Engine Room when his past self would need to find her again. The ship's increasingly frequent shudders made a few of her arrows more jagged and uneven, but they were coherent enough to read.

Leon spotted the entrance to the hangar just as she was finishing the final arrow, the first direction that he had found hours earlier when he left the hangar by himself in search of his squad. McCallister stumbled after him as he bolted into the hangar.

The bodies were as he had last seen them: dusty and decomposing on the hangar floor, scattered around the old, decrepit scout ships. A blue flash zigzagged around two of the small ships, fading within seconds of its birth. More blue flashes were occurring concurrently throughout the cavernous space, appearing and disappearing at exponentially increasing rates.

From deep within the corridors of the Chasm, the shadow monster screamed again, giving chase after them. Gunfire and human screams echoed through the energy surges taking place around them as Leon and McCallister hurried across the hangar: pieces of the history of the Chasm were leaking through the blue rifts and bleeding into their timeline.

Leon saw a few silhouettes of people as they stumbled out of one surge only to topple forward into another. It truly was Hell breaking loose around them. Reality was coming undone on the Chasm. A massive blue surge of energy exploded overhead, and the ceiling imploded downward, crashing to the floor of the hangar in a rush of plaster and concrete.

He and McCallister dodged it, and he sprinted the last few steps toward the hangar's doors to the Gummi port, but he did so alone. McCallister hadn't moved with him. Instead, he looked back to see the soldier running toward the pile of debris that had crashed through the ceiling. Pipes and broken rafter beams were jutting up out of the mess, but as the dust cleared, Leon saw that McCallister was moving a specific jagged piece of iron away from a fresh corpse.

A large crack sizzled across the hangar floor, causing the back tire of one of the scout ships to sink into it. Blue light bubbled up out of the crack. The stabilizers on the energy core were failing fast. They had less than five minutes before this was all over.

"Wake up!" McCallister abruptly yelled.

Leon's senses jarred as deja vue hit him. He spun toward McCallister again, but she was on her knees, kneeling over the body in the bloody spacesuit.

Oh no…Holy shit…

"Come on. Wake up." She shook the body, examining what Leon could now see was a massive stomach wound that was gushing blood.

His vision tunneled slightly, and he looked down at his own shirt front, where the blood had dried from his own healed wound.

"Cura." McCallister snapped, drawing glowing green magic from the air and healing the would-be fatal wound on the stranger.

The two survivors that he remembered from his first awakening…

"McCall—" Leon wheezed, and cleared his throat to regain his voice. "We have to go."

The crack on the floor expanded, and the entirety of the scout ship disappeared into it.

"NOW." He ordered.

McCallister started to stand, but faltered, blood loss combining with the strain of conjuring the healing spell. "We can't just leave him here like this—"

Leon mouthed soundlessly for a moment, staring at the limp body on the pile of debris. The suit was torn and bloody, and the visor was broken open, giving him a good look at his own face under the helmet.

"I'll—" He started, but began again. "…He'll be fine. Trust me."

Before McCallister could argue, the floor jolted violently, and the entire stern section of the hangar dropped, collapsing into the innards of the ship.

"It's falling apart." Leon glanced around, remembering that McCallister still had her radio on her belt. "Give them the go-ahead."

Lolly and Banks would be able to detonate the explosives with an override code on the Gummi. McCallister nodded curtly, leaving her only weapon—the silver Glock—with the other Leon before standing. She tugged the radio from her belt and sprinted toward him. Together, they rounded the corner and left the bay of the hangar, moving toward the port.

"Banks, Lolly." McCallister yelled into the radio. "We're here. Light 'em up!"

They swung out into the port, and the battered side of their Allied Gummi was the most beautiful thing that Leon had seen all day. He and McCallister rushed toward it, and Lolly leaned out of the open door, extending an arm and swiftly helping McCallister up into the hold of the ship. Leon swung himself up in after them, and Lolly stood, slamming the door closed.

"Go!" The man screamed.

Banks, in the cockpit, jammed the accelerator down. The Gummi Ship violently detached from the body of the Chasm. They broke free, and the three of them in the hold toppled over each other in chaos as the Gummi Ship shakily fled the Chasm's port.

"What about that monster?" Banks called back.

"It's the spider." Leon grabbed onto the wall for support. "The ship is the web. We're the flies. It'll die with the Chasm."

Lolly scrambled for the cockpit, accessing the remote detonator override and punching in the code. His half-glance back to the hold was all the warning that they were going to get. McCallister wrapped her legs around the piping of the Gummi wall, and Leon grabbed a hold of the bolted down legs of the table in the hold. Lolly detonated the explosives.

For a single, eternal moment, the universe was quiet.

Then an explosion ripped across the fabric of the air, blasting the Gummi away from the Chasm and sending them tumbling across the void of space, careening out of control toward the atmosphere of The World That Never Was.

A ring of blue aftershock reverberated out of the shattering ship, and it rushed over the Gummi like a wave of ocean water. Every cell in Leon's body felt electrified and painfully so.

"Holy balls!" Banks swore. "Hang on!"

Lolly was pinned in the doorway between the cockpit and the hold, desperately holding onto the frame of the door to keep from being flung across the hold or through the windshield.

Disorientation spun through Leon's head. He lost direction of which way was up or down, and where to even begin to look to see if the explosion had fully obliterated the Chasm. He could only assume the sudden friction in the air was the heat of the Gummi pushing through the atmosphere of The World That Never Was, and not the hellfire of the explosion deciding to obliterate them as well.

In a gust like a sharp exhale, the rush and the friction and the heat ended, and the Gummi ended her tumbling and abruptly righted itself, with Banks cursing the cosmos and praising the universe in the same breath.

The blue glow from the explosion bled through the portholes in the sides of the Gummi, and Leon hardly had time to register the blinding light before the sensation of ice water crashed over his body and plunged the entire interior of the Gummi to oblivion.


	5. Part Five

**Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This story is mine, as are the OCs. This last chapter stumped me for a while, but I finally punched it out. Thanks to everybody who stuck with this little fic that could. Enjoy!**

**..:-X-:..**

**Part Five**

"Mayday! This is the Allied Ship Venture." Banks was barking at the radio. "We're coming in hot, people. Hold onto your ass!"

From his spot in the hold, Leon could see into the cockpit and through the windshield, though it was a slurring mess of blue and white colors streaming beyond the glass. It looked like nothing to Leon, but Banks apparently could see, because she was frantically pulling levers and pushing buttons on the control panel.

"Brace for impact!" She yelled. "Less than five seconds til emergency crash landing off the coast!"

Leon's gut churned more than the vertigo was already causing it to. Water landings had never been on his list of preferable ways to crash land. The Gummi by this time was only just angled away from a complete nosedive, which wasn't a comforting thought.

"Three…Two…One!" Banks counted down.

The ship connected with the surface of a body of water, and it halted its momentum almost entirely in that split second. The sudden stop nearly dislodged Leon from his spot in the hold, and he saw Private McCallister slam into the wall where the momentum HAD jostled her grip, which had been weakened by the blood loss from the wound in her shoulder. Banks and Lolly in the cockpit were also both being shoved to and fro with the movement of the ship.

The Gummi bobbed violently upward as it leveled out, and Leon could hear steam hissing away from the outer plates of the ship as the water cooled them. Leon exhaled heavily and drew a deep inhale, glancing down at himself to make sure that all of him was still attached and hadn't been ripped away in the chaos. Finding himself uninjured, he looked across the hold to McCallister. The soldier was pale from blood loss, a pallor that was sharply contrasted by the dark blood staining her shoulder and a fresh, shallow cut on her jawline where she had collided with the Gummi's wall on impact.

"McCallister." Leon said, releasing his grip on the wall and shuffling over to the soldier.

Her eyes were glazed as they shifted to him, but she blinked and got her knees under her.

"M'all right." She grunted, letting go of the wall and starting to stand.

Water bubbled up through the seams in the floor.

"Evacuate." Lolly snapped, climbing out of the cockpit and moving into the middle of the hold. "Exterior was damaged in the crash. Ship's sinking."

Leon stepped toward the cockpit. "Banks—"

"I'm comin'!" Banks said, grabbing up a bag that she had thrown against the wall. She slung it over her shoulder and made a shooing motion. "Go, go, go!"

The Gummi was going down by the nose, listing to the right as she went down. Lolly busted out the side door of the hold and gestured for the others to go first. Banks started to argue, but the stern rockets at the back of the ship were beginning to smoke and groan. The major shut her mouth and immediately leapt out of the open wall, landing in the frothy gray waters of the coastline. McCallister followed, and Leon evacuated next, leaving Lolly to be the last out.

Banks was paddling like a crazy person for the shore; Leon could practically hear her worrying about the Gummi Ship exploding once the water flooded the rockets. It wasn't an unfounded fear, and Leon waved for Lolly and McCallister to follow Banks's example. Lolly was quick to give chase after Banks with long sweeping strokes. McCallister floundered, coughing water and sinking briefly under the surface; her shoulder injury prevented her from swimming properly.

The rockets on the sinking Gummi snarled angrily as the foamy water pushed its way inside, and Leon hastily maneuvered toward McCallister, tugging her good arm across his shoulders and aiming them both for the shoreline of The World That Never Was.

"Kick." He ordered. "I've got you; just kick."

McCallister coughed out another mouthful of water and obeyed, kicking to keep herself afloat while Leon was tasked with swimming them both to the shore. A small crowd of Allied uniforms had gathered on the coastline, hailed by Banks's mayday call and from the streak that the crashing ship had left in the sky. Almost all of their faces were turned upward, however, as debris from the demolished Chasm burned up in the atmosphere and descended as ash over the world.

Soon Leon's boots scraped the sandy floor of the shallows, and he stopped treading water and began to step against the tide toward the beach. McCallister got her feet under her, but the soldier had finally reached her limit and succumbed to the blood loss shock, lethargically stumbling against him.

"Okay." Leon grunted. "That's enough."

Bending over slightly, he dropped his arm, which had been around her shoulders to hold onto her, around the narrow of her back, and he slid his other arm under the water, gathering her knees together and hooking his elbow under them, effectively scooping McCallister up bridal-style. She fell slack in his grip, surrendering to the vertigo, and her head dropped back, baring her neck long to the sky. She mumbled incoherently in protest.

"Medic." Lolly was ordering the soldiers that had gathered on the shoreline. "Somebody fetch a medic."

"And a few fucking towels!" Banks input, arms wrapped around herself and shivering against the chill of the air. "Who's the commanding officer here? It's an exploding ship, people. Not some mystical nebulae; stop gawking and do something useful. Damn."

A tall, broad shouldered woman with small eyes and a sharp jaw emerged from the group of soldiers, wearing the marks of a lieutenant. Her red hair was pulled back in a tight bun.

"Commander Leonhart." The woman's voice was low pitched and gruff. "I'm Lieutenant Hope Briggs. This way, sir, we have a medical transport waiting to take you and your squad to the base."

Leon couldn't muster the energy to say anything, so he merely followed after Lieutenant Briggs. The cool air was driving through every space between his clothes and his skin, sapping any and all body heat that it could manage. He bit back a shiver and carried McCallister the ten meters to the square, white van that was waiting for them with the back doors open. Two men in medical uniforms wheeled a stretcher over to meet him, and Leon deposited McCallister's limp and bloody form onto it.

Lolly and Banks were up ahead, having climbed into another transport vehicle themselves as they were uninjured. The medics slid McCallister's stretcher into the back of the ambulatory van, and Leon gingerly climbed in after them, loitering at the back of the van while the two men assessed Private McCallister's injuries.

**..:-X-:..**

"One hour?" Leon asked a while later, sitting across from Lieutenant Briggs in the de-briefing room in the station on The World That Never Was. "That's all?"

Lieutenant Briggs's expression was stony, and her hands were clasped in her lap in front of her. "Our last contact before your crash landing was a basic communique by Major Banks, saying that you were approaching the unidentified ship. That was one hour ago."

The de-briefing room was more of a study or home office that had been converted. Old, worn, wooden furniture sat comfortably around the room. Bookshelves and oil paintings that were dark with age covered the walls, and a small fireplace was crackling to the right of the couch and wingback chairs where Leon and his squad were huddled.

Well, most of his squad. Banks was being de-briefed by Merlin in another room. The old sorcerer had rushed to The World That Never Was upon hearing about what had happened on their mission. Lolly was standing in the corner, arms folded, looking like an animal trapped in a cage. His dark eyes flickered around the room at uneven intervals, waiting for the blue flash that he had grown so accustomed to after three years on the Chasm. McCallister was sitting on the other end of the couch from Leon. The couch was long enough that there was nearly three feet separating them. Her arm was in a bulky sling, and the spare clothes that the base had provided didn't fit her well, making her look smaller than she was.

"What happened on that ship?" The lieutenant asked. "We were under express orders not to fire on the unidentified ship until you and your squad fully evaluated its status. You were given a six hour window. One hour later, you're crash landing off the coast and the vessel has self destructed. Care to fill in those blanks?"

Leon straightened in his seat, narrowing his eyes. "Remember your station, Lieutenant."

Briggs pursed her lips. "I'm sorry, sir. We're just a little confused around here."

"Get in line." McCallister grunted, her eyes staring at the lit fireplace.

"Remember your station, _private_." Briggs snapped at McCallister.

"There was an anomaly on the ship." Leon cut in. "Something no one in the Alliance has seen before. The important thing is that the problem has been taken care of."

Briggs looked like she wanted to press the matter, but mouthing off at a superior officer once was too much, twice was reprehensible. Instead, she straightened and smoothed her uniform.

"Commander Highwind will be on his way shortly to transport you back to Radiant Garden. We'll…Our base will close the case on the unidentified ship." She replied with a terse nod.

Leon returned the nod and stood. His ribs jarred with the motion, and the pain that shot through his knee was familiar at that point. He stood straight anyway and glanced over at Lolly. The other man was statuesque in his corner, pale and haggard, but unnervingly composed.

"You're dismissed, Lieutenant Briggs." Leon stated.

The soldier bristled but chastely obeyed, leaving the room and closing the door after herself. As soon as the door clicked, McCallister stood and Lolly stepped out of his corner.

"The media got a hold of some pictures taken earlier." Lolly grunted. "Of the Chasm, exploding in the atmosphere. Of you carrying McCallister out of the ocean, covered in blood. They're making up their own stories faster than the Alliance can respond to them."

McCallister interjected. "The unidentified ship was public knowledge. Everyone on The World That Never Was could see it while it was in orbit. Of course they saw it explode. Everybody knows that this world has no future. It has no strengths or economy, no industry or agriculture. It serves no purpose other than to…exist. It is the world that…never was. Some cockamamie story or conspiracy theory is just what they want to try to bring in tourists."

"Forget that. It's out of our hands at the moment." Leon waved them off.

"Out of our—It was _taken_ out of our hands, sir." McCallister gestured.

"First we have to get to the bottom of what happened on that ship." Leon talked over her.

**..:-X-:..**

Major Valerie Banks shifted in her seat, blankets bundled around her. The office where she sat across from Merlin was warm enough, but the memory of the cold water off the coast remained with her, causing her to find some comfort in cocooning herself in blankets.

"We encountered a…an anomaly onboard the ship. The Chasm, it was called. Massive energy surges due to a weakening core stabilizer were causing temporal fluctuations within the contained space of the ship." She explained. "All four of us experienced…shifts when we individually encountered the rifts caused by the energy surges."

A long beat passed.

"Are you saying that you and the others traveled through time?" Merlin asked, dissecting her jargon. "This happened during every energy fluctuation?"

Valerie stared at her hand as she picked at her thumbnail. "Something like that…but not just—time." She glanced at Merlin furtively. "I swear I left the ship."

Merlin surveyed her expression for a long moment, and she inwardly recoiled. This was fucking ridiculous. She sounded like a damn nutter. She couldn't refute what had happened to her, though. She had left the Chasm and wound up in Radiant Garden, but not HER Radiant Garden. The different…realm? Universe?...where she had wound up had been so different, in subtle but dizzying ways.

"Where did you go?" The old wizard asked, not as though he thought she was crazy, but in a genuinely curious tone.

Valerie relaxed slightly at his sincerity. "It was Radiant Garden, but somehow more…fuck." She rubbed her eyes with her thumb and index finger, starting again. "One second I was on the Bridge of the Chasm, and the next second I was hurtling into the middle of a fucking battleground in Radiant Garden…against—" She cut herself off.

Merlin's eyebrows quirked. "Against whom?"

Valerie averted her eyes, sighing heavily before looking back at Merlin. If she was really going to stick to the truth of what had happened to her, then it was balls to the wall.

"Xehanort." She replied. "And…fucking…Sephiroth was with the Alli—No, it wasn't the Alliance, it was some other faction, but he was a general. They called him General Sephiroth. He was one OUR side. The fuck, seriously? That lunatic?"

"Tell me about who you met."

She scoffed, "Y'know, the people of Radiant Garden. They were all there: Leonhart, Lockhart, Strife, Gainsborough…But—oh, that was something weird too…Cloud and Tifa were together, and Leon was with Rinoa. There was no—SOLDIER. That's what it was called." She slapped her thigh, suddenly remembering. "Their armed forces were called SOLDIER with Sephiroth as their fucking general, and…and SeeD. Leonhart was all about this SeeD shit."

Merlin blinked, "That is…different. No Alliance?"

"No, but like I said, Leonhart and the whole Restoration Committee was there. Even you." Valerie made an absent gesture. "And all these other people that I didn't know…These…Turk people…" She trailed away, lost in the memories.

Merlin looked perplexed by that, but not off-put. "And you said you found yourself there in a middle of a battle? Against Master Xehanort with whom?"

"Some…" She squinted, the details fading even as she tried to concentrate on them, like trying to hold onto smoke with her bare hands. "…supersoldier faction called Deepground. They had these…abilities…that just…" She looked down at her palms, the images plastered over her eyes.

"You fought?"

"For my life. Shit." She hunched in her seat. "After they questioned me and put me through the ringer…I wound up in a helicopter. It was war by land, air, and sea, dammit. I think I got shot down…or was shoved down. I dunno, we fucking crashed, and then this portal opened up—"

"Like the red surge that sent you there in the first place?" Merlin questioned.

"Kinda, but not." She narrowed one eye. "Sorry, I'm fucking this up."

Merlin offered a small smile. "You're doing fine. You have been through quite the experience. All of you have. I'm surprised that you were able to retain that much, amongst everything else you encountered on the Chasm."

Valerie nibbled on her fingernail before meeting his eyes again. "What was that though? Another realm? Some other universe? The Hell." Her hand fell with a slap to the armrest.

The old wizard adjusted his spectacles over his nose. "I'm not entirely sure, Major, but it sounds like something that we will be investigating for some time. Did these people, these alternate versions of the Restoration Committee, question you about this realm?"

"Well, sure, they were soldiers. I was a stranger. They—" She paused, looking at him.

Another thought spearheaded into her mind. Her first instinct when she landed in bizarro Radiant Garden was to cut, slice, and maul her way back to her own universe. The disorientation and vertigo of it all had activated her shoot-first gut response. What if the people in that reality had the same thoughts about her? Now that the knowledge was out there—these two universes were aware of each other—would that realm try to access this one? If they did, would it be for alliance or for invasion? Was it possible to cross over again? She had done so entirely by accident due to the alien and unstable nature of the Chasm's energy core. Surely they would never be able to replicate that…

Merlin was staring at her in concern.

Valerie straightened, shoving the thoughts aside for later. "Yes, they questioned me."

Merlin glanced down at the notes that he had been scribbling. "What else do you remember? What else stood out? I presume that you will be including all of this in your formal report, but…for me...while it is all still fresh, if you please."

Valerie sniffed and sat forward, forearms across her knees as the blankets pooled in her lap. She eyed the old wizard, but for a brief moment, her mind saw through him, back through that red flash and into the bowels of that other reality. There had been so much—too much to properly explain to him in this one interview. Commander Highwind would laugh her report, surely, but Merlin seemed sincerely intrigued by her account.

She pursed her lips, opened her mouth, closed it, and then whispered. "Valhalla."

Merlin tilted his head forward. "I'm sorry? I didn't catch that."

"Etro—" Banks blinked and abruptly stood, "Nothing. It was…nothing. Never mind. I need to go."

"Major—" Merlin stood as well.

"Commander Highwind will be here soon. I need to see Leonhart and the others before we go…I…Sorry, that's all I can—"

"Valerie." Merlin's voice was soft.

She slowed as she crossed the room to the door leading out of the small office. "I'll send you the first copy of my report when we get back to Radiant Garden."

Before he could question her further, she had left, sweeping into the hallway, torn between going to shoot something and breathing into a paper bag. What was happening to her? What had happened to her?

"Fuck." She muttered and headed for the main study where Leonhart, McCallister, and Lolly would be.

**..:-X-:..**

Cid Highwind landed his ship on an open platform directly outside the Allied base on The World That Never Was, and all four soldiers of the recon squad were already outside, waiting and eager to go home.

"Well, you all look gorgeous." Cid greeted, swinging down from the cockpit of his ship. "I heard you experienced a little turbulence."

"Quite a bit more than that, I'd say." Merlin tutted, approaching them.

Banks looked uneasy, but Cid didn't worry too much about that. She was always a bit on edge. As was Private McCallister, usually, but when Cid looked at the soldier, with her arm in the ill-fitting sling, she looked entirely too amused at the ash clouds overhead, where the debris from the strange ship was breaking up in the atmosphere. It looked like she was on pain pills. The really good ones.

Leon looked more miffed than anything else, and exhausted on top of that. Lolly, at least Cid figured it had to be Lolly but damn he looked different for some reason, trudged up at the rear of the weary squad.

"I'm—" Merlin lifted a hand as he hastened to Cid's side. "I'm not entirely sure that they should be travelling right now. They just underwent a huge ordeal in space. They're disoriented and…kerfuffled."

"Kerfuffled?" Cid lifted an eyebrow. "Hey, Leon, you feelin' too kerfuffled to go home?"

Leon saluted him with a silent middle finger as he climbed up into the ship. He helped McCallister maneuver up with her gimpy arm, and Cid snorted, looking to Banks.

"And you?" He asked.

The major exhaled and shook her head. "Sir, honestly, all the shit got fucked up. I just want to go home."

Cid offered a one-shoulder shrug as she climbed up into the ship with Lolly after her. Watching the four of them slouch into their seats for the ride back to Radiant Garden, Cid frowned, rubbed his jaw, and glanced at Merlin.

"Kerfuffled, huh? That your official diagnosis?"

Merlin huffed, "You're mocking me."

"Well, I sure as shit ain't taking you seriously." Cid swung himself up into the cockpit. "Staying or going?"

"Staying." Merlin replied, looking unsettled. "I need to look into a few things about this…what do you call it…FUBAR situation."

Cid nodded and sat back in the pilot's seat, closing the door of the cockpit. Banks closed the other door to the hold of the ship before buckling herself in.

"Homeward bound, kiddos." Cid called back, bringing the engine to life and raising the ship into the air.

**..:-X-:..**

When Cid's ship touched down in Radiant Garden, Leon, McCallister, Banks, and Lolly all unconsciously exhaled in relief. The hangar was relatively empty. Cid had briefed them on the flight back, revealing just how extreme and how fast the rumors had spread about the ship that had blown up in the airspace of The World That Never Was. Leon was too exhausted to care, and his mind was still unraveling, trying to figure out for himself what he and the others had been through on the Chasm.

From the future or from the past, wherever the ship had come from was far better equipped than the Alliance. That was even more terrifying than anything else. They could handle the rumor mill and the ignorance of the media. It looked like Tifa and Yuffie had dispelled any of the reporters or curious onlookers who wanted to see their weary squad return. Leon was grateful for that.

Leon was the first to unbuckle his safety belt, standing and moving toward the porthole, where he could see Yuffie aggressively ushering some of the press away from the hangar and Tifa standing with her arms folded and frowning at the ship. Lolly stood from his seat, popping open the side door and being the first to exit the ship. Banks unbuckled her belt and headed toward the cockpit to talk to Highwind, since he was her direct superior officer.

"I'm confused." They were first words that McCallister had uttered since leaving The World That Never Was.

Leon glanced back at her, seeing her fumbling with her seat belt. The drugs had worn off for the most part, though she still looked disoriented. He pursed his lips and walked over to her, swatting her hands away and undoing the buckle himself.

"No, not that." She grumbled, wriggling out of the belt and maneuvering to her feet.

Leon let her stand alone. She was still disoriented from blood loss and the fading effects of the pain killers, but she was more or less steady on her feet. She frowned, adjusting the sling around her shoulder, and looked at him.

"If we traveled through time on that ship, how is Banks still alive?" She asked.

Leon narrowed his eyes and looked toward the cockpit, where Cid and Banks were climbing out of the ship to the hangar floor. He had been wondering that too. The times that he had encountered his past self in the Chasm, he had later repeated each encounter as the other side. Present and future became past and present. They had seen Banks get shot through the head though, on the ship, by some unknown enemy, but it hadn't come to pass with the Banks that they had escaped with.

So what had happened to the Banks that was killed to put her in that situation? Was that a future that hadn't yet come to pass? But the Chasm had been destroyed, so there shouldn't exist any longer a reason for her to be on that ship. It wasn't her past, and it wasn't a plausible future.

"I don't know." He replied. Then, in response to her flat look, "We'll discuss it later, after sleep and a shower."

She snorted at that, and they stepped out of the Gummi.

Tifa crossed over to them, her expression one of both relief and concern. "Hey, welcome home. I heard you had quite the adventure."

McCallister scoffed loudly, an unusual noise coming from her. Maybe the drugs hadn't quite worn off on her yet. Tifa's eyebrows shot up, and she looked from the soldier to Leon.

"It's an obnoxiously long and confusing story." Leon answered.

Just seeing Tifa made his shoulders feel lighter, and it was easier to shrug away the past several hours of chaos. She had that effect on him. Her easy smile showed that she knew it too as she put her hands on her hips.

"Well, I look forward to hearing it." She quipped, looking to McCallister again, taking in the bulky sling, the pale face, and the glazed eyes. "You look like you've been through the mill."

McCallister shifted self consciously, keeping a stiff upper lip. "I'm fine."

"Like Hell you are." Leon remarked.

Tifa seemed to come to the same conclusion, because she asked McCallister, "Do you have someone you can call? Maybe you shouldn't be alone for a day or two until you've recovered a bit."

"I'm fine." McCallister repeated.

Leon frowned, looking to Tifa. "I'm going to make sure she gets to her apartment, then I'll come home, all right?"

"All right." Tifa looked placated.

Leon started to turn to aim a miffed McCallister toward the door, but Tifa's hand at his elbow stopped him. He looked back to see Tifa's eyes at his midriff, where the blood stains from his mended stomach wound had dried dark. The hole in the shirt was very visible, but only showed his unbroken skin where the blood had stained.

Her gaze lifted to meet his eyes, and the question this time had no mirth behind it.

_What happened to you guys out there?_

He reached over and lightly pinched her forearm to set her at ease.

_We're okay._

Her throat bobbed, but she nodded, giving McCallister a playful wink and Leon a reassuring smile before letting them go. McCallister squinted one eye at her, but she allowed Leon to steer her toward the hangar door without argument.

**..:-X-:..**

McCallister's apartment was in the part of town that hadn't seen much reconstruction since the Restoration Committee was formed. Luckily she lived on only the second floor out of seven, but the stairs wiped out the bare reserves of energy she had left. She had descended into grunting as her primary form of communication as Leon fumbled the keys from her and unlocked the door.

Her apartment was scarcely furnished yet surprisingly cramped and cluttered, a contrast to her rigid and austere personality. Leon got the soldier to sit at the foot of her bed and not topple over while most of her attention was focused on keeping her eyes open. He helped her change into loose fitting clothes, being as gentle as he could with the uncomfortable state of her shoulder.

"M'f'ne." She garbled.

"Uh huh." He replied, tugging on the strap of her sling. "Do you want to sleep in this?"

McCallister's brow furrowed and she frowned at the contraption. "Nah."

He loosened the strap and maneuvered the thing off of her, setting it aside. The motion caused her shirt to shift, and the raised skin of the scar across her collar bones glared up at him. How many scars was this woman going to wind up with because of him?

He got her settled on the bed—though she could have sleep soundly on the floor at that point—and straightened, shaking his head. They both looked a sight: him covered in blood and his clothes torn up and her pale and covered in callouses and bruises.

"You keep saving my life." He muttered.

Her eyes were closed, but she mumbled in response, "You keep getting in trouble." Then, because even exhausted half to death she couldn't let it slide, she added, "Sir."

Leon snorted and made his way to the bedroom door. "Yeah, whatever. Thanks."

"You're welcome." She grunted, not opening her eyes.

"Sleep it off. We'll talk tomorrow and get this crap sorted out. Okay?" He stated.

McCallister slumped gingerly against her pillow. "You're welcome."

Leon shook his head and left the apartment at that, locking the door after himself.

The walk home was long, and it took all of his willpower not to drop back into thinking about the mission that he had returned from. He just wanted to go home, take a shower, climb into bed with his wife, and fall asleep with her.

Did Banks's claim have any validity to it though? He had always known her to be a very logical and sensible person. For her to start talking about other realms…She had to believe what she was saying, and she had to know how ridiculous it sounded. Shoving his hands in his pockets, Leon glanced skyward at the night stars.

Another universe…where the Alliance didn't exist, but some other organizations called SOLDIER and SeeD did, where Sephiroth was on their side, and where he and Tifa were with completely different people. He frowned and turned up the walkway to their house, finding the lights on. Tifa was on the front porch, moving a pet brush over Duke, their golden retriever.

She looked up as he trudged up the steps, but she didn't say anything as he sank down to sit next to her, slumping against the wall and dropping his head back with a sigh. He closed his eyes and listened to the cicadas humming in the yard. Duke's wet nose touched his hand, wanting attention, and he scratched behind her ear absently.

"So time travel…" Tifa prompted.

"Shh…" Leon didn't open his eyes, patting her knee.

She snorted, then, "Alternate realities?"

"Shh…"

"All right." She chuckled.

They sat like that for a while, in a comfortable silence. For tonight, just for tonight, this was the only reality, the only timeline, that he cared about. Tomorrow they would figure this out. Tomorrow they would run the reports.

Tomorrow they would officially re-open the Chasm case as a private investigation.

**..:-X-:..**

**A/N:** But wait…there's more! The events of this story tie directly into an upcoming Alliance-verse story called _Sentient Midnight_, and will have extensive ramifications for at least two subsequent installments in my Alliance-verse stories. Keep an eye out for the first chapter of _Sentient Midnight_, which should be coming soon.

Also, major thanks to HeartofFyrwinde for helping me work out the kinks in this story. Eventually there will be a collaboration regarding Banks's experience in the alternate reality of HeartofFyrwinde's universe.

I hope you've all enjoyed the ride! Thanks for reading.


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